Databases are different from a lot of software. For one, they often favor stability over innovation. This is not a general rule, but as databases are responsible for a core layer of any IT system – data storage and processing — they require reliability. This requirement does not always pair with the latest and greatest improvements that have not been hardened over time.
Even with that, the fact that MongoDB 5.0 is planned for EOL in October 2024 and MongoDB 6.0 is planned for EOL in July 2025 should put MongoDB 7.0 on your radar. Even if you are not considering all the interesting improvements that have been added by the development team from MongoDB, this new version is already very important from the database supportability and lifecycle planning perspective.
Why choose Percona Server for MongoDB?
Percona provides a drop-in replacement solution for MongoDB Community Edition that is based on the same upstream code delivered by MongoDB, Inc. The difference between Percona Server for MongoDB and MongoDB CE is that we strive to provide a gap-closing set of features for users who want to use MongoDB in production. These enterprise features include, but are not limited to:
- Security improvements – Among which is the KMIP and Hashicorp Vault integration.
- Availability solutions – Advanced backups, including physical backups and point-in-time recovery that are not available to MongoDB Community Edition.
- K8s Operator – An enterprise-grade k8s operator to run your workloads in Kubernetes.
- Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) – A fully open source monitoring tool to help you run your databases (not limited to MongoDB).
Why release Percona Server for MongoDB 7 now?
The dev teams from MongoDB, Inc. delivering the Upstream code do a great job and build a very solid tool. With that said, each new major version, by definition, introduces enough big changes to require a certain amount of precaution.
We explicitly delay the release of each main version of MongoDB server to take extra time to validate whether all of our added functionalities work well with the given version.
We also spend extra time to ensure that the quality of the release is good enough for our customers to start using. Think of us as the extra set of eyes, the extra layer of QA to ensure your safety passage to the next database version.
This time around, the first version we were able to release as Release Candidate (RC) was 7.0.2, which was released as Percona Server for MongoDB RC 7.0.2-1. Expect GA release soon to follow.
Important changes in MongoDB 7
One of the most eyebrow-raising changes that MongoDB 7.0 introduces is the limitation of the downgrade process. Reading the below would not make me feel at ease while performing an upgrade:
Binary downgrades are no longer supported for MongoDB Community Edition. (source)
followed by
Starting in MongoDB 7.0, you cannot downgrade your Enterprise deployment’s binary version without assistance from support. (source)
What it means is that there are some important changes coming with 7.0 that can also be very beneficial for you. What it also means is that in case of any problems with your upgrade, as soon as you change the fCV to 7.0, the way back will be closed without a time-consuming and operationally complicated logical restore or complicated and tailor-suited solutions requiring a lot of experience.
What it also means is that binary downgrade may still be possible for enterprise customers of MongoDB. Documentation does not limit that option.
Percona offers upgrade support to get you safely through the upgrade process. We also provide Managed Services to take this stress off your shoulders so that our top-of-the-market experts handle your databases for you.
To check out the list of changes that MongoDB 7 introduces, check out the summary write-up in Percona Server for MongoDB 7.0.2-1 release or the full release notes from MongoDB Inc.
What’s coming next
We are working on improvements available previously only to the MongoDB Enterprise users that will impact scalability and availability of especially large datasets.
We also want to focus more on the security aspects not available outside of MongoDB Enterprise.
Our Operators Team is also working on improvements especially important for sharded clusters, and the Percona Monitoring and Management team is planning to look into more scalability and management-enhancing options.
Stay tuned for more news about MongoDB offerings.
Learn more about Percona Server for MongoDB
