MongoDB 8.0 offers significant performance improvements to read throughput, bulk writes, and more

MongoDB has announced the release of the latest version of its database platform—MongoDB 8.0. According to the company, this release offers significant performance improvements compared to MongoDB 7.0, such as 36% better read throughput, 56% faster bulk writes, 20% faster concurrent writes during replication, and 200% faster handling of higher volumes of time series data, alongside lower resource usage and costs. 

Some of these performance optimizations were gained by changes made to the architecture that allows for reduced memory usage and query times. It also can now perform more efficient batch processing for inserts, updates, and deletes.

This release also features faster and more cost-efficient horizontal scaling, which allows data to be split — or “sharded” — across multiple servers (shards). In this release, data can be distributed across shards 50x faster for up to 50% lower cost compared to MongoDB 7.0.

Another notable update is that users now have more control over optimizing performance during unpredictable usage spikes and periods of sustained high demand. They can now set a default maximum time limit for running queries, reject recurring types of queries that have caused issues, and set query settings that will persist through events like database restarts.

MongoDB 8.0 also offers better support for search and AI applications through quantized vectors, which are “compressed representations of full-fidelity vectors.” According to the company, these require very little memory and are very fast to retrieve—all while preserving accuracy. 

And finally, it is introducing updates to MongoDB Queryable Encryption, which is a capability that allows users to encrypt sensitive data, store it in their database, and run queries on the encrypted data. Now users can perform range queries, which further reduces the risk of data exposure and exfiltration by keeping it encrypted throughout its full lifecycle. 

According to MongoDB, it has already moved its internal build system over to MongoDB 8.0 and its development team has seen a 75% query latency reduction since switching over. “This was a double win, as it improved the performance of our own tooling, and it set our performance chat room abuzz with excitement in anticipation of delighting external customers. While results may vary based on your particular workload, the point is that we just couldn’t wait to share MongoDB 8.0’s performance gains with customers,” Jim Scharf, CTO of MongoDB wrote in a blog post.