News

New Couchbase Server, SDKs Tout 'Developer Empowerment'

• By David Ramel
• October 10, 2014

Numerous Big Data-related moves made by NoSQL database vendor Couchbase Inc. this week included releases of a new version of its flagship Couchbase Server and new SDKs aiming to provide "developer empowerment."

The Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of database management systems built with Membase technology called Couchbase Server 3.0 its "most significant release to date," featuring improvements in five main areas. In addition to developer empowerment, those include mission-critical scale and performance; ultra-high availability; secure communication; and enterprise-grade administration.

Key to empowering developers are new version 2.0 SDKs for the various languages used in the Couchbase ecosystem: C, Java, the Microsoft .NET Framework, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby.

"Providing a robust set of SDKs that take advantage of the most advanced development models is critical to our ability to become the NoSQL database of choice for developers building high-performance applications," said Couchbase exec Ravi Mayuram. "The 2.0 releases represent more than a year of work not only from our engineers, but the open source communities that actively contribute to making our SDKs best in class. We think developers are going to be delighted by new capabilities like support for reactive programming in Java, the ability to quickly build high-performing Web scale applications, and native support for JSON objects."

Reactive programming is an increasingly popular declarative approach in which variables are automatically propagated through the system when referenced values are changed, as in a spreadsheet where cells that contain a formula to present a value are automatically updated when values in dependent cells are changed.

In addition to the new support for reactive programming, the SDKs feature a more consistent experience for developers spanning all platforms, which the company said helps developers working with multi-language projects build Couchbase applications no matter the language of choice.

Also new is native support of JSON objects across all the SDKs, which the company said obviates the need to use third-partly libraries while maintaining the ability to support various data types.

Better integration with the Spring Framework and ASP.NET, along with streamlined connection management that boosts the speed of high-performance operations, are among other improvements to the new SDKs.

Developers can also now further investigate the company's upcoming query language currently under development. "One of the most exciting integrations in the release is support for the developer preview of Couchbase's next-generation query language, N1QL," the company said in a statement. "This language provides the ability to perform SQL-like queries against Couchbase Server, the world's fastest NoSQL database. All of the Couchbase 2.0 SDKs include support for the developer preview of N1QL, so developers can begin to build fluency with the N1QL language."

Couchbase Server 3.0 itself reportedly includes more than 200 new features and improvements, highlighted by core architecture extensions such as stream-based Database Change Protocol (DCP) and Dynamically Tunable Memory.

The company said DCP uses in-memory communication for moving huge chunks of data speedily throughout a system, reportedly providing 100x improvements over disk-based communication protocols used in other databases.

Dynamically Tunable Memory lets users control the amount of data kept in memory and on disk at runtime, which the company said opens up more use cases for enterprises and optimizes use of resources depending on an application's performance needs.

"Couchbase is setting the agenda for scalable, high-performance distributed database technology, with innovations like being first to integrate a distributed cache with key-value storage and a document database in a single platform, and delivering the first NoSQL mobile database, said Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold. "We continue to make huge advances in foundational database technologies, including storage, mobility, query and performance. With Couchbase Server 3.0, we've significantly broadened the use cases we can support so more enterprises can join leaders like AT&T, Walmart and eBay, who run high-performance mission-critical apps on Couchbase."

The company also announced several other initiatives during its Couchbase Connect 2014 conference this week in San Francisco, including: general availability of the Couchbase Hadoop Connector for Cloudera Enterprise 5; a partnership with consulting company Wipro to train employees on using Couchbase technology; and a joint development effort with cross-platform tool maker Xamarin Inc. to release Couchbase Lite for .NET.

(NOTE: Originally this article mistakenly reported that Couchbase products are based on the Apache CouchDB database, while they actually are built on Membase. ADTMag.com regrets the error.)