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Couchbase has released Couchbase Server, a new database system powered by the Apache CouchDB NoSQL database technology.
Officials at Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created by the merger of CouchOne and Membase, said the new Couchbase Server is well-suited for developers because it leverages the standard http protocol, making it easy to integrate with a wide variety of languages and applications. Couchbase Server also incorporates geospatial indexing via GeoCouch, an open-source component developed by a Couchbase engineer, enabling developers to easily create location-aware applications.
“Couchbase Server is the first product to be released from our newly combined company, and the speed at which we can deliver this offering is a testament to the strength and agility of our engineering team,” said Frank Weigel, director of product management at Couchbase, in a statement. “With Couchbase Server, we believe we have shipped the best, most widely deployed and safest NoSQL solution on the market-powered by a technology that our team created and knows best, Apache CouchDB.”
And with CouchDB at its core, Couchbase Server’s schema-free document model is targeted at web applications. Its built-in JavaScript-based map/reduce-indexing engine makes it work well for analyzing and querying data, the company said. And the server’s peer-based replication capabilities allow full queries, updates and additions, even while disconnected from the network.
Couchbase officials also touted the popularity of the CouchDB platform. CouchDB has more than 10 million desktop deployments, and organizations worldwide rely on CouchDB’s unique replication and sync capabilities, including Apple, The BBC, CERN and Mozilla. In addition, CouchDB supports more than 1.5 million users as the core database behind Canonical’s Ubuntu One cloud service.
Moreover, Couchbase Server is developed, certified and supported by core committers to the open source project, led by CouchDB creator and Couchbase founder, Damien Katz.
“CouchDB was my attempt to bring what was powerful about replication and synchronization to data in the modern web world,” Katz said in a statement. “We’re excited to offer Couchbase Server as a way to give a wider range of users the features they have been asking for and to better cater to our customers’ needs.”
Free Couchbase Server downloads are available for both the Community and Enterprise editions. The Couchbase Server Enterprise Edition is recommended for organizations that plan to use the product in production. It is subjected to a rigorous quality assurance process and delivered with a “long-tail” maintenance guarantee, including indemnification and SLA-backed support options to minimize system downtime and revenue uptime. The API is fully compatible with Couchbase Server Community Edition. The Couchbase Server Community Edition is for developers or hobbyists who want a compiled, easily installed binary distribution. Applications developed with the Community Edition can be deployed into production using the Enterprise Edition without modification.
Couchbase Server binary packages are available for Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
CouchDB puts the data in the hands of the user in a transparent way,” Kowsik Guruswamy, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Mu Dynamics. “No longer do we have to wonder which fields to index and why and how it best fits certain queries. The incrementally updated view paradigm is a powerful one which scales wonderfully.”
“I’m a huge CouchDB fan – adding in geo-spatial indexing has enabled much of the groundbreaking work being done around the world in open government apps,” said Max Ogden, Code for America Fellow and creator of the PDX API, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) API.
Meanwhile, Couchbase also announced its board of advisors, including some industry heavyweights with ties to companies such as Cloudera, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Zynga, among others.
“The recent merger of CouchOne and Membase brought together not just a dream team of engineers, but also a veritable -who’s who’ of industry leaders on our Couchbase advisory board,” said Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase in a statement. “We are honored to have these distinguished individuals on our extended team, helping us accelerate our ability to deliver on the power and promise of NoSQL database solutions. Ultimately, our customers and users will benefit from the concentration of data management expertise and industry experience we gain through our Couchbase advisors.”
Members of Couchbase’s advisory board include: Frank Artale, a general partner at Ignition Partners and a former software industry executive over the last three decades; Josh Berkus, one of the core team members of the open source database project PostgreSQL; Roy Fielding, a pioneer of the World Wide Web, open source, and software architecture; Richard Hipp, the architect and primary author of SQLite; Robert Johnson, director of infrastructure software engineering at Facebook; Alan Kasindorf, who runs memcached.org; Cadir Lee, CTO at Zynga; Mike Olsen, CEO of Cloudera; Steve Souders, who leads web performance and open source initiatives for Google; and Chris Wensel, CTO and founder of Concurrent.