Document-oriented database company MongoDB Inc. today announced a raft of updates to its product portfolio today, including a new release of its namesake database software.

The company is also adding more features to MongoDB Atlas, the cloud-specific version of its database, and launching a brand new product database synchronization platform for developers.

MongoDB is an open-source, document-oriented database that’s used to power big-data applications and other data-intensive workloads. MongoDB’s popularity stems from the fact it’s a so-called multimodal database that can handle a wide range of applications.

That benefits developers because it means they need to learn only one query language and a single, consistent application programming interface to build them. The MongoDB database is most commonly used for analytical and transactional applications in the finance, healthcare, insurance and telecom industries.

The MongoDB 4.4 release, now available in beta, offers new features such as Union, which enables users to blend data from multiple datasets into a single set where they can perform deeper exploration and analysis of that data.

The release also adds the ability to define and refine shard keys, meaning users can now adjust how data is distributed across clusters to help their applications scale out when needed.

Meanwhile, MongoDB Atlas, a fully managed cloud version of the MongoDB database, has been given a couple of useful new features, including Atlas Data Lake and Atlas Search.

The Atlas Data Lake feature gives users an easy way to access their existing Amazon S3 storage buckets from within the MongoDB Atlas console, which makes it easier to run queries or explore their data using the MongDB Query Language. For example, it’s now possible to run federated queries, analyzing live MongoDB Atlas data and historical data on Amazon S3 together in one place and return a single query response. Not least, Atlas Data Lake is an entirely serverless service, which means there’s no need to worry about setting up or maintaining any infrastructure.

As for Atlas Search, it makes it much easier to perform searches of Atlas datasets. Once indexes have been created using either the Atlas user interface or its application programming interface, the company said, developers can run sophisticated search queries using MQL.

Finally, MongoDB said it’s announcing the first beta release of its new serverless mobile database and synchronization platform, MongoDB Realm. The new platform was born out of a marriage between Realm, a company that MongoDB acquired last year, and MongoDB Stitch, which was the company’s original serverless platform.

MongoDB Realm is specifically designed to power mobile applications and helps ensure those apps don’t drain the battery life or hog the network data of the device they’re running on, the company said. One of its main features is Realm Sync, which enables the bidirectional synchronization of data between the Realm mobile client and MongoDB Atlas, making it possible to share data seamlessly between devices.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that with its new release, MongoDB is helping developers become more productive.

“MongoDB is increasing developer’s velocity with regard to building next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “New features that help with this include support for Union, the consistent search and data lake capabilities with MongoDB Atlas and edge database support with Realm. The suite level benefits are increasing with MongoDB 4.4, and that makes it even more attractive to developers as well as executives as the main database for their next-generation applications.”

Photo: MongoDB