MongoDB has made significant progress since its first public release in February 2009, with tremendous support from the developer community. The team has released two stable versions (1.0 and 1.2) and is planning a third stable release with features such as better concurrency, geospatial indexing, and usability enhancements. Despite making great strides, MongoDB still has a long way to go, but it's suitable for solving many real-world problems for a large subset of the developer community. The team is currently focusing on improving replication, production-ready sharding, embedded documents, atomic update operators, single-server durability, full-text search, and other key areas. MongoDB was designed with real-world experiences in mind, taking a relational database and changing its data model to create a document-based system that offers features such as embedded docs for speed and manageability.