Percona Server for MongoDB 5.0.2 Release Candidate Is Now Available

We’re happy to announce the first release candidate of Percona Server for MongoDB version 5.0.2 (PSMDB). It is now available for download from the Percona website and via the Percona Software Repositories.

Percona Server for MongoDB 5.0.2 is an enhanced, source-available, and highly scalable document-oriented database that is a fully compatible drop-in replacement for MongoDB 5.0.2 Community Edition. It includes all the features of MongoDB 5.0.2 Community Edition, as well as some additional enterprise-grade features.

The most notable features in version 5.0 include the following:

• Resharding allows you to select a new shard key for a collection and then works in the background to correct any data distribution problems caused by bad shard keys and improve performance.
• Time Series Collections are aimed at storing sequences of measurements over a period of time. These specialized collections will store data in a highly optimized way that will improve query efficiency, allow data analysis in real-time, and optimize disk usage.
• Resumable Index Builds means that the index build for a collection continues if a primary node in a replica set is switched to another server or when a server restarts. The build process is saved to disk and resumes from the saved position. This allows DBAs to perform maintenance and not worry about losing the index build in the process.
• Window operators allow operations on a specified span of documents known as a window. $setWindowFields is a new pipeline stage to operate with these documents.
• Versioned API allows specifying which API version your application communicating with MongoDB runs against. Versioned API detaches the application’s lifecycle from that of the database. As a result, you modify the application only to introduce new features instead of having to maintain compatibility with the new version of MongoDB.

Additionally, new aggregation operators such as $count, $dateAdd, $dateDiff, $dateSubtract, $sampleRate and $rand are available with this release.

Note: As with every major release, version 5.0 comes with a significant number of new features and is still being rapidly updated. At this point, we’re making this version available as a “Release Candidate” only and we strongly suggest not to use it for production environments yet. However, we do encourage the use of this version in test and development environments.

We’re also still in the process of integrating support for version 5.0 into our other products. While Percona Backup for MongoDB 1.6.0 has just been released to support this version, some other products still need to be updated and tested.

For example, the Percona Distribution for MongoDB Operator will have PSMDB 5.0 support from version 1.10.0, which is slated to happen in mid-September.

On the Percona Monitoring and Management side, Percona Server for MongoDB 5.0 support is scheduled to be included in version 2.22.0 (currently targeting the end of September).

Because of these factors, we will not release version 5.0 of our Percona Distribution for MongoDB until we’ve updated these products and have gathered enough confidence to remove the “release candidate” label.