NoSQL database startup Couchbase is planning on big things for 2012. The company has a new database release in the works, while still respecting its Apache CouchDB roots.
Couchbase was formed in February of 2011 as a merger between CouchOne and Membase. Over the past year, the company has evolved and moved beyond being just about CouchDB.
“From a product perspective we have recently been focused on the integration of CouchDB into Couchbase server 2.0,” Couchbase CEO, Bob Wiederhold, told InternetNews.com.
The Couchbase Server product had formerly been known as Membase Server. The company has also recently decided to end support for a product known as Couchbase Single Server, which was a packaged distribution of Apache CouchDB.
“We provided Couchbase Single Server as a courtesy to help people to be able to go someplace to get packaged up bits,” Wiederhold said. “We thought it was a good idea in Feburary 2011, but it turned out that it just confused people to no end.”
Wiederhold noted that Couchbase Single Server is different than Couchbase Server and there isn’t complete compatibility between the products. That’s why Couchbase Single Server product is no longer being offered by Couchbase as of January 23rd. All of the code and packaging for the product is being donated back to the Apache CouchDB project.
To make matters more complex, CouchDB remains a key component of the Couchbase Server. Another key component of Couchbase is the open source memcached caching technology.
“We have a great relationship with the memcached community and we want to continue to have a great relationship with Apache CouchDB,” Wiederhold said.
Couchbase 2.0
Couchbase’s next generation product is currently in developer previews and should be generally available in a few months.
“Couchbase 2.0 really is an extension of Membase Server 1.7,” James Phillips, co-founder and SVP products at Couchbase told InternetNews.com. “It’s a feature release from where we’ve already been.”
Philips noted that the plan is to deliver a schema-less, real-time dynamic database, that adds the ability to more rapidly index and query data.
“We do believe that this release will expand the number of applications that we can support,” Philips said.
The Couchbase Server itself is an open source project that is very active, according to Phillips. There is a freely available community edition that represents the leading edge of the open source project’s efforts. Then there is an enterprise edition that is based on a snapshot of the Couchbase Server project and adds in support tools. The enterprise release also goes through a hardening that ensure that Couchbase the company can support the product as a sustainable product..
“There are no proprietary features,” Wiederhold stressed. “And we don’t have any plans to provide proprietary features.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
