NoSQL database giant MongoDB Inc. has moved to acquire WiredTiger Inc., which builds a database storage engine solution, barely a month after including the technology as an option in the latest version of its product.

It’s an important buy for MongoDB, and perhaps all the more so for the talent its acquired in the process – database experts Dr. Michael Cahill and Keith Bostic. Cahill, who founded WiredTiger, was previously one of the chief architects of Berkeley DB at Sleepycat Software and Oracle Corp., while Bostic was the co-founder of Sleepycat Software, which was acquired by Oracle back in 2006.

WiredTiger, described as a high-performance, high-throughput storage engine, was expected to be included an option in MongoDB 2.8 when it’s released in January. But now MongoDB has gone the whole hog and bought the entire company.

“Keith and Michael are both luminaries in the fields of data storage and transaction management, and they and the entire WiredTiger team are on exactly the same page as we are,” said MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz. “They are true paragons of the free software movement, and on their team, 15 years’ experience in the field makes you a relative newcomer.”

While other NoSQL databases have offered a choice of storage engines, this is the first time MongoDB users have the option. MongoDB’s own storage engine MMAPv1 works well enough with read-intensive applications, but the addition of WiredTiger should help users see a big performance improvement with high write-volume workloads. WiredTiger might also be a better option for mixed write-and-read-intensive applications, said MongoDB in a statement.

WiredTiger also brings features including multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), multi-document transactions, and support for log-structured merge-trees, or LSM trees, for very high insert workloads, the company said.

MongoDB is currently the fifth most popular database engine according to DB-Engines.com, and is the highest ranked NoSQL database.

MongoDB says WiredTiger will continue as its own project under active development in spite of the acquisition, though it aims to make it the default storage engine option for MongoDB 3.0. However, Horowitz says the company will continue development of its MMAPv1 storage engine.

“It will become one of a wide array of options made possible by our pluggable API, and for certain workloads, it will be the best choice,” Horowitz said.

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