After several release candidates, MongoDB version 3.2 is nearing completion. It brings a number of new features that users have been demanding:
-
No more dirty reads!
With the new “readConcern” query option, users can trade higher latency for reads that won’t roll-back during a partition.
-
Document validation!
While MongoDB doesn’t use schemas, users can define query criteria that will be checked to validate to new and updated documents. In addition to field existence and type checks, these can include logical checks as well (e.g. does field “foo” match this regex).
Other, less developer-facing features include:
- Encryption at rest
- Partial indexes
- Faster replica-set failover
- Simpler sharded cluster configuration
If you want to try out a MongoDB 3.2 release candidate, see the MongoDB development downloads page.
Of course, to take advantage of developer-facing features, you’ll need an updated driver library. All the MongoDB supported drivers have beta/RC versions with 3.2 support.
The current Perl driver beta is MongoDB-v1.1.0-TRIAL, which you can download and install with your favorite cpan client:
$ cpanm --dev MongoDB $ cpan MONGODB/MongoDB-v1.1.0-TRIAL.tar.gz
Some of the changes in the beta driver include:
- Support for readConcern (MongoDB 3.2)
- Support for bypassDocumentValidation (MongoDB 3.2; for when you need to work with legacy documents before validation)
- Support for writeConcern on find-and-modify-style writes (MongoDB 3.2; can be used to emulate a quorum read)
- A new ‘batch’ method for query result objects for efficient processing
- A new ‘find_id’ sugar method on collection objects for fetching a document by its _id field
Whether you’re ready for MongoDB 3.2 or not, I encourage you to try out the Perl driver beta.
If you find any bugs or have any comments, please open a MongoDB JIRA ticket about it, or email me (dagolden) at my CPAN.org address, or tweet to @xdg.
Thank you!