For NoSQL enthusiasts, one of the original batches of NoSQL databases was updated today. MongoDB 2.6 includes a rewritten query planner, support for bulk operations, and the general availability of text search for the database. The MongoDB Management Services suite was also updated with this release.

Kelly Stirman, director of product marketing at MongoDB, said that this release includes many features that were requested by users, and it lays the foundation for future advancement of the platform.

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“We’ve gone and done some interesting work rearchitecting the core of the database to make it easier to maintain and add features in the future,” he said. “We’ve rewritten the query planner as well. Relational databases have very sophisticated query planners, and no NoSQL really has a query planner.”

While MongoDB already had a query planner, the new planner is more advanced, said Stirman. “The way the query planner worked before, it would generate multiple query plans and figure out the most efficient one, then cache that plan and use it for a while. We still have that concept of a query plan cache, but now there are additional options to index those, not just to use one index at a time.”

That means a single index can serve multiple queries, rather than requiring a separate index be built for each query. This will save time and effort for users of the database, said Stirman.

Loading data into MongoDB should be a bit easier with version 2.6, as well. With the addition of bulk operations, large numbers of documents can be uploaded to MongoDB without the need to stop and start over if one of those items fails to arrive properly. Version 2.6 also adds the final version of the long-developed full text search support across the database.

For more enterprise-focused users, MongoDB Management Services were updated as well. Chief among the new features is the ability to quickly stand up a cluster of MongoDB servers.

Stirman said users can now “create MongoDB systems of any size and any topology. I myself created a 300-node sharded system, so you can do big things with this tool. First you can create, second you can manage and increase capacity, increase shards, create replicas and replica sets.”

This is also the first release of the MongoDB Management Suite to herald the forthcoming backup options for the database. While the features are not generally available yet, backup and replication will soon be a major part of the MongoDB platform. Individual backup policies can be configured, but by default, the system backs up all data once every six hours or so.

But perhaps the biggest change to MongoDB isn’t in this release: It’s planned for version 2.8, the release date of which is unknown at this time. But Stirman said that version 2.8 will include document-level locking, a much-requested feature.

“A lot of people criticize MongoDB on the topic of concurrency. People love to point out the limitations of database-level locking,” said Stirman. “The reality is, those criticisms are largely unwarranted. It’s very common for people to do tens of thousands of operations a second on a MongoDB server, and hundreds of thousands of reads. But we realize we can improve concurrency for those that push the envelope.”