MongoDB unveils data lake, mobile and field-level encryption features

New features rolled out with MongoDB 4.2 and the Atlas managed cloud service

MongoDB has come out with a slew of product announcements to coincide with its New York MongoDB World event and the latest iteration - version 4.2 - of its NoSQL database.

Two of the announcements relate to Atlas, MongoDB's managed cloud service, with Atlas Data Lake and Atlas Full-Text Search now both in beta. Data Lake is an object store which allows data held in a variety of structured, semi-structured and unstructured formats to be interrogated using MongoDB Query Language (MQL). Meanwhile, Atlas Full-Text Search is designed as an alternative to Elasticsearch or Apache Solr, adding full text search capabilities natively on the managed MongoDB cloud.

In May, MongoDB splashed out $39 million for mobile database and sychronisation platform Realm. This will be integrated with the Stitch serverless platform with the result rebadged as MongoDB Realm. Mat Keep, senior director products and solutions, said the move was in response to the growing importance of mobile.

"MongoDB's document model has always made it a good fit for a wide range of use cases. With the new Realm integration and our pre-existing mobile products, we're extending that usability to even more places and to more types of developers," he told Computing.

Keep namechecked convenience store chain 7-Eleven with its 7-Now ecommerce app as a current mobile user, and mentioned that insurance firm AXA is building the next iteration of its myAXA app on MongoDB.

MongoDB 4.0 introduced multi-document ACID transactions across replica sets, but in version 4.2 this capability is extended to sharded clusters. Meanwhile, the data visualisation tool MongoDB Charts has reached the general availability milestone.

Another update in MongoDB 4.2 is field-level encryption, in which data can be selectively protected on a much more granular basis than before. In a press release, the company said this represents a "different and more comprehensive approach than column encryption used in legacy, relational databases. It is totally separated from the database, transparent to the server and handled exclusively within the MongoDB drivers on the client."

The statement continues: "Most databases handle encryption on the server-side, which means data is still accessible to administrators who have access to the database instance itself, even if they have no client access privileges. Field-level encryption changes that."

Field-level encryption has a number of advantages, according to the company, including compliance with GDPR's ‘right of erasure' - personal data can be rendered unreadable simply be destroying the key associated with it. Separation of duties means that access to logfiles, backups and other systems via the client is restricted to people who have been explicitly granted access, while automatic transparent encryption means that the usual database reads and writes can be carried out as before, but other operations will require use of specific cryptographic functions in the SDK.

"It's a unique approach that is more transparent and automatic than anything else in the industry," Keep said.

However, the security issues around MongoDB that hit the headlines tend to be less about internal controls and more about poor implementations in the cloud, such as when 445 million customer records were found on MongoDB database running on unsecured AWS server.

"Regarding databases that have been misconfigured and left open on the internet, we have spent years and invested heavily in trying to help developers avoid this," Keep said.

Local hosting has been the default option since version 3.6, he pointed out; meanwhile the company has been seeking to propagate best practice through free MongoDB University courses, documentation, blog posts, events and social media.

On Atlas the issue does not exist as databases are always encrypted, he said.

"Within MongoDB Atlas, our cloud database, encryption is enabled by default and it can't be turned off."

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