MongoDB has released version 1.8, which introduces journaling, sharding performance improvements, replica set enhancements, spherical geo search, covered and sparse indexes, B-tree index self-compaction, new map/reduce options for incremental updates, tab completion in the shell, mongostat --discover, and other features and bug fixes. The release is considered stable and follows up on the previous version 1.6, which was released in August 2010. The MongoDB community provided valuable feedback and testing throughout the development series leading to this release.