Reasons to Upgrade to MongoDB 3.6

Database upgrades are a concerning thought for many database administrators. You know there’s a lot of potential for things to go wrong, and it’s difficult to get a go-ahead when the current version still functions. MongoDB 3.6 (and now 4.0) makes this decision easier by offering seven compelling reasons to go through this process.

1. Better Security

Security is almost always going to act as the primary motivator for upgrading your databases. The threat and cost of data breaches are significant, and migrating to the latest MongoDB version is the easiest way to get access to enhanced security features and patches. Once hackers find a way to get into older versions of databases, they often look for as many vulnerable ones as possible. If you stick with an older MongoDB database, then you could end up on their list.

2. MongoDB 3.4 is Reaching End of Life

MongoDB 3.4 is only going to receive support until September 2019. After that, it reaches its end of life. MongoDB 3.2 is already at end of life. Both 3.6 and 4.0 are ready for prime time. While it’s frustrating to have to make a lot of changes to a system that’s still working properly, it’s not worth risking unexpected downtime and data breaches by putting off the process.

3. Improved Development Speed

The latest features in MongoDB give your organization greater agility by boosting your development speed. MongoDB is already a developer-friendly platform, and the latest upgrade continues to make it accessible to a wide base of developers. Dynamic document schema can be modified without taking the database down, which makes many parts of the development cycle faster.

4. Fully Expressive Array Updates

Have you run into problems with complex array manipulations with previous MongoDB versions? This feature gives you the opportunity to incorporate richer data modeling in your applications. You even end up using less code to get the same results. Performance tweaks are also in place, which is useful for elements that are deeply nested.

5. Always-on Write Availability

This change is fairly self-explanatory. You can set write availability to always be on, which enables your database to retry writes that have failed. The primary benefit of this feature is to cut down on the error handling that the server has to perform. This frees up server capacity for other important functions.

6. MongoDB Compass

Three important changes were made in MongoDB Compass in 3.6. You now have auto-complete for operators and field names, query history and table view. These improvements make it easier to put together MongoDB queries and work with the data.

7. Change Streams

Many applications rely on real-time data for their core functionality. You can leverage this responsiveness in MongoDB through Change streams. Anytime data changes, you can make the application trigger actions.

Datavail is an IT services provider with extensive experience with MongoDB and other data management solutions. Our services include database administration, enterprise applications and custom application development. In addition to MongoDB, we also have relational database experts.