MongoDB 3.0 has landed.

The development cycle for 3.0 has been the most eventful of my entire career. As originally planned, it would have been great, but still incremental in nature. Instead, we wound up acquiring our first company, integrating their next-gen storage engine, and by capitalizing on that unlooked-for opportunity, delivering a release so beyond its original conception that we revved its version number.

Renaming a release in-flight is out of the ordinary, so I wrote about our reasoning when we announced the change. We had originally planned to deliver document-level locking built into MMAPv1, and a storage engine API as an investment in the future, not part of a fully developed integration. That would have been our incremental improvement, in line with our storage engine efforts throughout the 2.x release series. We had already added database-level locking, iterated over many improvements to yielding and scheduling behavior, and refactored a ton of code to decouple components.

Today our team made public our first release candidate of MongoDB 2.8, rc0.

Since June, beginning with MongoDB World 2014, I’ve been speaking publicly about MongoDB 2.8, and its headline features: document level locking and pluggable storage engines. What I haven’t said until now is just how related these two features are.

We’ve been working on our storage API for roughly a year, and with MongoDB 2.8 rc0, we’re rolling out the first fully supported and working storage engine integration: WiredTiger.

MongoDB 2.6 has been released. For my thoughts on many of the features of the release, please see my blog post on mongodb.org.

Beyond the features, this release means a lot to me. In five years, we’ve gone from four people trying to figure out if a document database was a viable concept, to the fifth most popular database in the world. MongoDB 2.4 and all previous releases proved that the document model can transform how modern applications are developed and deployed. Despite this, we knew many of MongoDB’s core components were imperfect. It was time to address these shortcomings.