NoSQL database MongoDB has acquired database storage engine technology WiredTiger and in the process gained the talent of database experts Keith Bostic and Dr. Michael Cahill.
Before founding WiredTiger, Cahill was an architect of Berkeley DB at Sleepycat Software and Oracle Corp. Bostic was co-founder of Sleepycat Software, which Oracle bought in 2006.
MongoDB previously announced WiredTiger, which it describes as a high-performance, high-throughput storage engine, as an option in the upcoming release of MongoDB 2.8, due out in January. Instead it opted for the buyout.
“Keith and Michael are both luminaries in the fields of data storage and transaction management, and they and the entire WiredTiger team are on exactly the same page as we are. They are true paragons of the free software movement, and on their team, 15 years’ experience in the field makes you a relative newcomer,” MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz wrote in a blog post.
Though other companies have offered multiple storage engines, it’s MongoDB’s first crack at it. WiredTiger is expected to greatly improve performance for high write-volume workloads.
While its existing storage engine MMAPv1 works well with read-intensive applications, WiredTiger may be the better choice for write-intensive and mixed write-and-read-intensive applications, the company says.
Meanwhile, the DynamoDB cloud service and Cassandra put write performance over consistency and read performance.
MongoDB’s new pluggable storage API in MongoDB 2.8 allows third parties to build custom storage engines for specific workloads, hardware optimizations or deployment architectures.
WiredTiger will remain its own project under active development after the buyout, with MongoDB aiming to make it the default storage engine for MongoDB 3.0. It also will actively support and continue development on MMAPv1, Horowitz said.
It has extended it Bug Hunt, offering prizes to those that identify critical issues, through the holidays.
DB-Engines ranks MongoDB the most popular NoSQL database and the fifth most popular database overall behind Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
Feature image via Flickr Creative Commons.
