Couchbase update
I checked in with James Phillips for a Couchbase update, and I understand better what’s going on. In particular:
- Give or take minor tweaks, what I wrote in my August, 2010 Couchbase updates still applies.
- Couchbase now and for the foreseeable future has one product line, called Couchbase.
- Couchbase 2.0, the first version of Couchbase (the product) to use CouchDB for persistence, has slipped …
- … because more parts of CouchDB had to be rewritten for performance than Couchbase (the company) had hoped.
- Think mid-year or so for the release of Couchbase 2.0, hopefully sooner.
- In connection with the need to rewrite parts of CouchDB, Couchbase has:
- Gotten out of the single-server CouchDB business.
- Donated its proprietary single-sever CouchDB intellectual property to the Apache Foundation.
- The 150ish new customers in 2011 Couchbase brags about are real, subscription customers.
- Couchbase has 60ish people, headed to >100 over the next few months.
If you previously heard the brand names Couchbase Single or Couchbase Mobile, pay no further attention to them. Couchbase Single was CouchDB; Couchbase Mobile is part of Couchbase’s feature set.
The current product is Couchbase 1.8, which is a whole lot like what previously was called Membase. New features in Couchbase 1.8 (versus prior versions of Membase) were concentrated in client libraries/SDK (Software Development Kit). Not coincidentally, Couchbase has hired developer evangelists who are in charge of making Couchbase play nicely with various specific languages (e.g. C/C++)
Drilling down further into the CouchDB part of the story:
- Couchbase 2.0 will replace Couchbase 1.8/Membase’s SQLite back-end with CouchDB.
- Parts of CouchDB that do things like read, write, or compact data have been rewritten from Erlang to C.
- Couchbase still uses other Erlang parts of Apache CouchDB, and would be delighted if the community were to usefully enhance them.
- Couchbase’s heavy contributions to development of open source CouchDB will, for the most part, continue.
- CouchDB stuff donated to the Apache Foundation includes:
- Documentation
- Packaging
- Performance enhancements
There’s at least one Couchbase user with >1000 nodes (at a guess, Zynga). More typical might be 20 nodes or less. This led me to wonder how much data one puts on a Couchbase node anyway. The answer turns out to vary widely, in that you want your working set to be in RAM, and whether that’s your entire database or just a slice of it depends on the nature of the application.
James echoed a trend I’ve heard elsewhere as well, in which products one things of as being internet-specific are also sold in a few cases to conventional enterprises for — you guessed it! — their internet operations. I also asked him about competition, and he asserted:
- MongoDB is the big competition. He believes Couchbase has an excellent win rate vs. 10gen for actual paying accounts.
- DataStax/Cassandra wins over Couchbase only when multi-data-center capability is important. Naturally, multi-data-center capability is planned for Couchbase. (Indeed, that’s one of the benefits of swapping in CouchDB at the back end.)
- Redis has “dropped off the radar”, presumably because there’s no particular persistence strategy for it.
- Riak doesn’t show up much.
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7 Responses to “Couchbase update”
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Most of the people from Couchbase (and CouchDB) have agreed that the 5 bullet points in my http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/16348086045/couchbase-clarifying-confusions-in-5-bullet-points are cleanest way to describe the current status and the future at Couchbase.
No mention of Amazon DynamoDB.
Once Redis Cluster is ready it will be a competition.
Amazon DynamoDB is so new, it’s tough to make a strong comment one way or another. The difference between a service and software you manage yourself is pretty big, plus the vendor lock-in to a specific cloud. I’d look into the cost, performance and feature set of DynamoDB for comparisons…pretty sure Couchbase is still on top.
As for Redis, even they don’t call themselves a database (they are a “data structure server”). In-memory only means you need a LOT of RAM even if all your data doesn’t need to be in RAM. Even with the Redis Cluster (which has been “coming” for a long time) we still don’t really see it as a true competitor. Certainly some use cases overlap, but we’re going for a much larger market.
Perry
[…] “Persistent Memcached is a useful thing,” said Curt Monash of Monash Research, noting that sales of the Couchbase NoSQL database, built on Memcached, have been quite strong. […]
[…] “Persistent Memcached is a useful thing,” said Curt Monash of Monash Research, noting that sales of the Couchbase NoSQL database, built on Memcached, have been quite strong. […]
[…] multiple delays, Couchbase 2.0 is well into beta, with general availability being delayed by the holiday season as […]
It’s difficult to find well-informed people in this
particular topic, however, you seem like you know what you’re
talking about! Thanks