MongoDB today announced the general availability of MongoDB 2.6, a release which marks one of the most important milestones for MongoDB since the database’s launch in 2009. The company has added automation features to its MongoDB Management Service (MMS) including incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, visualization and alerts, and a fully-managed solution in the cloud.

Also new to MongoDB 2.6 is a feature called index intersection which provides adaptive analytical capabilities. This newest version also includes improved text search, improved enterprise security features, bulk update operators that simplify the loading and updating of large data volumes, and new pipelined data transformation capabilities.

The company says it has also improved scalability and performance in MongoDB 2.6, and is looking forward to adding more features in the future. “We have…completed fundamental changes to the core that will allow us to improve concurrency in MongoDB 2.8 and beyond,” said Eliot Horowitz, cofounder and CTO of MongoDB.

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Mixed reaction from Dev/Ops teams

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MongoDB, an open-source, document-oriented database for analytical and fast-changing operation workloads, has been hugely popular with application developers due to its agile and scalable approach. “But the response has not always been so positive from the operations team whose job it is to support these applications at scale,” observed Jeff Kelly, Principal Research Contributor at Wikibon.

Kelly said MongoDB has recognized this reality, adding that the company has made some good first steps towards making MongoDB easier to manage and support from an ops perspective. “It will need to continue making improvements in this area in order to truly crack the enterprise market,” Kelly said.

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MongoDB’s history

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The MongoDB platform has come a long way since its roots as an internal project at 10gen (as the company MongoDB was known at the time). The internal project’s goal was to build the first, completely open, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) stack. To do that, it needed a flexible database capable of handling different types of information while still providing seamless scalability and ease of use.

However, none of the products on the market at the time fit all the criteria so 10gen decided to build its own database. “When we built MongoDB, the goal wasn’t just to build something scalable, but…to build something that would be really efficient and productive for developers to use,” MongoDB’s co-founder Max Schireson told theCUBE host John Furrier in an exclusive interview at Oracle Open World 2012. “We didn’t want developers to have to make a tradeoff between the two.”

The company said its vision is to strike a balance between the simplicity of MySQL and the flexibility and performance offered by document storage. Ultimately, the decision to build its own database would transform the company from a little-known cloud startup into one of the driving forces behind the NoSQL revolution that is sweeping through enterprise IT today.

In August 2013, 10gen changed its name to MongoDB to “get back into alignment” with its product strategy. In October 2013, just four years after switching markets, the company landed a record-setting $150 million in funding from a group of heavyweight investors.

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MongoDB today

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The company’s approach has been well-received in the market, both with startups and large enterprises now utilizing MongoDB in production. Some of the world’s leading banks, telcos, government organizations and Web-based companies use the platform today. “The most significant thing is the way that MongoDB is becoming accepted as a mainstream tool for building applications,” said Schireson, who was promoted to CEO in 2013.

MongoDB has been leveraging this momentum to scale operations and expand its market reach, teaming up this past January with risk management insurance company RMS to deliver a cloud-based risk management platform that runs on top of its namesake database. The insurance giant is the most recent addition to MongoDB’s long list of high-profile strategic partners, which also includes Red Hat, IBM and Hadoop business intelligence specialist Pentaho..

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Watch the entire interview between theCUBE host John Furrier and MongoDB’s CEO Max Schireson:

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Photo credit: JohnGoode via photopin cc

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this story.