Eliot Horowitz and the rest of the core MongoDB Team released a post on the project blog today addressing current and future development of the project. The team has released two stable releases — 1.0 and 1.2 — and has a third, version 1.4, coming that contains “better concurrency, geospatial indexing, “usability” enhancements and speed enhancements, to name a few.” These enhancements should be available in future versions on a planned three-month release cycle.

Eliot feels that the team has accomplished about half of their grand view for the project and hopes to address a few areas he and others feel the project is lacking in the next 6–12 months. A few of the items on the list are better replication, production-ready sharding, more features for working with embedded documents, and full text search capabilities.

He goes on to explain that he has changed how he describes MongoDB to interested parties. He envisions the project being an improvement on some of the shortcomings of relational databases such as MySQL. He states that “there are a lot of things that work great in relational databases: indexes, dynamic queries and updates…and we haven’t changed much there,” and that, as one example, the project aims to keep the methods for designing indexes the same as a database administrator would employ on a MySQL or Oracle database, but give him or her the option of indexing an embedded field.

The team is excited about production over the next year and continues to appreciate the community for the support, advice, debugging and interest it gives.

You can download the latest stable and unstable version of the MongoDB project from the download page and follow the instructions in the quickstart or the getting started page to get up and running. There is a listing of community support channels including a mailing list, IRC channel on Freenode, and the project blog if you need help or wish to get involved.