The Perl MongoDB driver has been released as version 0.46.1 after a long delay, featuring mostly minor fixes and housekeeping to prepare for more frequent releases in the future. The release includes improvements such as automated building using Dist::Zilla, faster UTF-8 validation, improved regex serialization, and bug rejection of document key names with NULL bytes. The driver's metadata has also been cleaned up, with links to GitHub and JIRA sites. Looking ahead, priorities for version 0.47 include eliminating dependencies on Module::Install, reworking documentation, and replacing AUTOLOADed methods with safer generated symbols.