Couchbase Makes Case for Enterprise-Class Document Database

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At a Couchbase Live New York event today, Couchbase announced the general availability of an upgrade to its document database that delivers on a promise to add SQL support and the ability to scale applications.

Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold says the addition of support for an N1QL query language, known as Nickel, along with multi-dimensional scaling and extended cross data center replication capabilities make Couchbase Server 4.0 a truly enterprise-class document database.

Leveraging the rise of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in the enterprise, Couchbase is locked in a contest with other providers of document databases that came to prominence as part of the so-called NoSQL movement. In reality, most of these databases support some form of SQL, which is still the lingua franca for querying databases inside the enterprise.

Rather than getting caught up in a marketing slogan, Wiederhold says it’s time for providers of document databases to support SQL largely because it will increase adoption of document databases inside the enterprise.

For the most part, document databases have been brought into the enterprise by developers that did not want to have to engage with the all complexities associated with a traditional relational database to build an application. With the rise of JavaScript on both the client and the server, document databases that supported JSON became a natural repository for those applications.

But like most new technologies, it’s only a matter of time before they have to adjust to the realities of enterprise IT, which not only values scale, but also the millions of dollars invested over multiple decades in technologies such as SQL.