In-Q-Tel, the venture investment firm for U.S. intelligence agencies, is investing in 10gen, developer of the MongoDB open source database.

MongoDB is a document-oriented, NoSQL database that “bridges the gap” between relational databases and key-value stores, according to 10gen. Its ability to store and query both structured and unstructured data with good performance at scale is what made MongoDB an attractive investment, said In-Q-Tel VP Robert Ames in a news release.

The platform can be used for operational intelligence, content management, and high-volume data feeds, according to 10gen. It also can be paired with Hadoop for big data management. “MongoDB is built to leverage big data and holds great promise for the development of new storage and processing capabilities,” Ames said.

Last month, 10gen released the latest version of its software, MongoDB 2.2, which features a new real-time aggregation framework, new sharding and replication features for multi-data-center deployments, and improved performance and database concurrency for high-scale deployments. The aggregation framework lets users directly query data without resorting to writing and running complicated, batch-oriented MapReduce jobs within the database.

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