The new version of the Perl MongoDB driver allows users to set a per-connection dt_type attribute, which can be used to specify whether DateTime objects or DateTime::Tiny objects should be instantiated for datetime values in MongoDB documents. This change aims to improve performance by avoiding the use of expensive DateTime validation and metadata creation when fetching large numbers of documents containing only simple date information that requires no manipulation. The author tested this new feature using a dataset from the GitHub Archive project, which contains a large number of JSON files with various datetime formats, and found that using DateTime::Tiny objects resulted in significant performance improvements compared to instantiating full DateTime objects or using raw datetime strings.