Most new applications being developed these days are loosely classified as systems of engagement designed to improve a customer or employee experience. After all, most organizations already have some form of system of record in place in the form of, for example, an ERP application.
Couchbase at a Couchbase Connect event this week announced a beta release of an update to its namesake document database that promises to make it simpler to build highly responsive systems of engagement by making more data available in memory.
Ravi Mayuram, senior vice president for products and engineering at Couchbase, says Couchbase 5.0 makes it possible for queries, indexing and high availability replication to run in memory. Other enhancements include built-in full text search with independent scaling with the same Couchbase cluster, the ability to run queries across databases located in multiple data centers, the ability to monitor queries, and support for role-based security.
At the same time, Couchbase this week previewed Couchbase Mobile 2.0, an update that provides access to new application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable faster queries and domain data modeling. This release will also add support for full-text search, multi-user applications and improved data synchronization and management.
Mayuram says the primary reason IT organizations need a document database to drive systems of engagement is because most of these applications are now being built using microservices enabled by containers. Those microservices applications perform a lot better when accessing persistent storage that runs in memory, says Mayuram.
“They need to be as close to the source of data as possible,” says Mayuram.
Developers have been employing document databases to build systems of engagement for years now. In many cases, they did an end run around the database administrator as part of a NoSQL movement that eschews relational databases in favor of a platform that a developer can set up on their own. But as the number of systems of engagement applications proliferate across the enterprise, the time may have finally come for IT organizations to start setting some document database standards. After all, the only thing worse than having to support multiple classes of databases is supporting multiple types of the same class of database.
