After more than 20 million downloads and thousands of enterprise deals, MongoDB Inc. is launching a new release of its namesake documenet store that is aimed at large organizations with broad and complex datasets.

Arguably the biggest enhancement in MongoDB 3.4 is support for graph processing, an addition that will enable users to analyze the relationships among their records using the native feature set. There are examples of the platform being used for such a purpose as early as 2013, but the task has historically required a great of deal of specialized code. Users can now look for connections inside their data without having to perform extensive tweaking beforehand.

A financial institution, for instance, could employ MongoDB to examine suspicious ties between transactions. And marketers can take advantage of the new functionality to gain a better insight into the people who discuss their brands on social media. With that said, the system probably won’t pose a threat to specialized graph stores such as Neo4j that were designed from the ground up to process data relationships. But today’s addition should still appeal to existing MongoDB customers that don’t want to set up another database in their analytics environments.

In the same spirit, today’s release also adds a so-called faceted navigation function that provides the ability to narrow down the data that a query retrieves using custom filters. The feature will make it easier for the numerous ecommerce companies that rely on MongoDB to implemenet search functionality in their sites. It should be especially useful for retailers with large product catalogs that require an extensive selection of filters to properly explore.

Rounding out the new release is a set of operational features designed to ease the management of large-scale deployments. The most valuable addition is a new multi-region partitioning capability for distributing datasets, which is geared towards organizations that run MongoDB across several geographically disparate facilities.

It’s joined by a read-only mode that provides the ability to expose information for an application without letting it make changes. The feature will simplify the management of sensitive records such as transaction logs that can be modified only in limited circumstances.

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