10gen wheeled out an enterprise edition of MongoDB this week as part of a new subscription level, certified for deployment on several operating systems and making good on why the company raised $42 million last year.

The widgetry includes Kerberos authentication for security, reportedly the top user request, on-premise monitoring so the data doesn't have to leave the house, and role-based privileges.

The monitoring is supposed to alert users on some 100+ operational metrics in real-time. The role-based privileges provide separate responsibilities for the server, database and cluster administration. And the monitoring can all be done behind the firewall.

The only way to get the enterprise code will be to pay for it. However, folks will be free to try it for as long as a year and it'll always be free for test and development.

Otherwise, it'll cost $7,500 a year per node bundled with an SLA that promises the company will respond to a showstopper within 30 minutes of the user opening a trouble ticket.

10gen may not be able to fix the problem immediately but at least it'll be working on it.

The company has retired its Silver and Gold levels and replaced them with a Basic enterprise subscription that runs $2,500 a year per node and a Standard subscription that costs $5,000 a year per node.

At the same time 10gen released MongDB 2.4, the next cut of the NoSQL open source database, and it's pleased as punch with the management, performance and productivity features it's added, presuming that the community will be equally pleased and drive further adoption.

The new release includes hashed-based sharding, capped arrays, text search and geospatial enhancements with GeoJSON support.

The database now provides horizontal scaling by transparently sharding data across multiple physical servers, a simple and even distribution of reads and writes to the data in MongoDB.

10gen's text search, a very practical feature since search is the primary interface for navigating data in many apps, is still in beta.

The company describes its new home-grown search as native, real-time text search that simplifies development and deployment for MongoDB users with stemming and tokenization in 15 languages. It's supposed to be able to search across a data center for what's needed.

Counts are reportedly up to 20 times faster in 2.4.

The company also says that performance for real-time data analysis using MongoDB's new aggregation framework is now three-five times faster for most operations. Application deployment has been simplified by eliminating the need for a separate caching layer. The database's working set analyzer helps users maximize their capacity planning based on an analysis of real-time application resource utilization and there's also improved replication.

MongoDB claims more than four million downloads. 10gen has more than 600 commercial customers including Cisco, Craigslist, Disney, eBay, Forbes, Intuit, LexisNexis, McAfee, MTV, Salesforce.com and Shutterfly.