MongoDB’s first version of the database shipped in August 2009. The 1.0 release and those that followed shortly after were focused on validating a new and largely unproven approach to database design – built on a document-oriented data model and layered onto an elastic and distributed systems foundation. Those early MongoDB releases attracted masses of adoption across startups and enterprises alike.
With early usage validating product/developer fit, the MongoDB engineering team’s focus shifted to Industrializing the system beyond a niche NoSQL database into a general purpose data platform capable of serving a broad range of modern, mission-critical applications.
Major enhancements have focused on resilience and scalability, transactional guarantees, the versatility of the MongoDB query API and drivers, expanded security and privacy controls, along with cloud and mobile services.
The latest Major Release of the database is MongoDB 5.0. Developers have downloaded MongoDB more than 175 million times, and have rated it as their most wanted database.
What’s New in the Latest MongoDB Versions
2020 — MongoDB 4.4
MongoDB 5.0 time series collections, window functions, and online archiving make it easier, faster, and lower cost to build and run IoT and financial apps
With live resharding, you can change the shard key for your collection on-demand as your application evolves with no database downtime or complex migrations
The MongoDB Versioned API future-proofs your applications. You can upgrade to the latest MongoDB releases without the risk of backward-breaking changes
Atlas Serverless instances (preview) automatically and dynamically scale to meet your workload and you pay only for the resources consumed
2019 — MongoDB 4.2
MongoDB 4.4, richer aggregations with UNION; refinable shard keys to adapt data distribution as workloads evolve; and hedged reads for consistent low latency
MongoDB Atlas Online Archive to automatically tier data between your database and your data lake built on cloud object storage
MongoDB Cloud, bringing together database, search, data lake, and Realm with a consistent API and data model for a unified cloud-to-edge developer experience
Realm Mobile Database & Sync, delivering best-in-class experiences with an intuitive mobile database, automated sync to MongoDB Atlas, and built-in conflict resolution
2018 — MongoDB 4.0
MongoDB Atlas Data Lake, enabling you to quickly and easily query data in any format on Amazon S3 using the MongoDB Query Language and tools
MongoDB 4.2, bringing distributed ACID transactions, client-side field level encryption, on-demand materialized views, and more to serve any OLTP app
MongoDB Realm, integrating the world’s most popular modern mobile database with MongoDB Stitch and Atlas to enable seamless data movement from the front to the backend
MongoDB Atlas auto-scaling for fully automated capacity management, and full-text search with Lucene indexes to filter, rank, and sort your data
2017 — MongoDB 3.6
Multi-document ACID transactions, making it even easier to address a complete range of use-cases with MongoDB
MongoDB Stitch, the serverless platform from MongoDB hits GA. Accelerates application development with simple, secure access to data and services from the client.
MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters, creating fully managed, globally distributed database deployments for low latency reads and writes anywhere, and data placement controls for regulatory compliance.
2016 — MongoDB 3.4
Multi-document ACID transactions, making it even easier to address a complete range of use-cases with MongoDB
Change streams and retryable writes to build always-on, real time, reactive applications
Fully expressive JOINs, array updates, and schema validation to build powerful applications with rich data manipulation and governance controls
MongoDB Atlas database service available on AWS, Azure, and GCP for freedom from cloud lock-in, and MongoDB Stitch to configure and run your application backend in the cloud
2015 (Late) — MongoDB 3.2
Multi-document ACID transactions, making it even easier to address a complete range of use-cases with MongoDB
Geo-aware zoned sharding for data locality, change streams and retryable writes to build always-on, real time, reactive applications
Fully expressive joins, faceted search, graph traversals, and many new query operators to build powerful applications on a single data platform
MongoDB Atlas, fully managed database as a service for MongoDB, available on-demand and pay-as-you-go
2015 (Early) — MongoDB 3.0
Multi-document ACID transactions, making it even easier to address a complete range of use-cases with MongoDB
Pluggable WiredTiger, In-Memory, and Encrypted storage engines with 50-node replica sets and geo-aware zoned sharding for an order of magnitude more scalability
Fully expressive joins, faceted search, graph traversals, and many new query operators to build powerful applications on a single data platform
MongoDB Atlas, fully managed database as a service for MongoDB, available on-demand and pay-as-you-go
2014 — MongoDB 2.6
Multi-document ACID transactions, making it even easier to address a complete range of use-cases with MongoDB
WiredTiger storage engine, document level locking, and built-in compression for an order of magnitude more scalability
Fully expressive joins, faceted search, graph traversals, and many new query operators to build powerful applications on a single data platform
MongoDB Atlas, fully managed database as a service for MongoDB, available on-demand and pay-as-you-go