The MongoDB team has just announced the release of version 1.4.0 for production. The new version is available for download at: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads. Notable updates found in the released include: background index building, better detection of regular expressions so the index can be used in more cases, fast new slaves from snapshots, REST interface is off by default for security (—rest to enable), can rotate logs with the logRotate db command, and partial matching of array elements with $elemMatch, to name a few. The full change log is available at: http://jira.mongodb.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10080. This release was announced on the MongoDB blog and also includes benchmarks comparing version 1.2 with version 1.4RC2. The results show that version 1.4RC2 is comparable, if not slightly faster, than version 1.2 in most things, like single threaded query performance and insert performance (which showed an increase of 10-30% vs 1.2). Not everything was faster, though, as creating an index after importing your data is generally faster than before, and this is even more so the case in 1.4.

To learn more about the new features and about MongoDB in general, check out Kristina Chodorow’s blog post on “AntidisestablishmentSQLism“. Kristina is a core contributor to MongoDB and wrote/maintains the PHP driver for it. Kristina also did a webcast for our Tek·X series on how, why, and when to use MongoDB.