Why Couchbase?

So apparently my last entry ruffled some feathers, so maybe I should explain why I think Couchbase is the future?

Simple Fast Elastic.

That’s pretty much it. We make it very simple to get started, we are extremely fast (and getting faster), and we really are “web scale”, with the ability to add and remove machines from a cluster to rapidly scale your capacity to your workload.

The Membase product was very fast and scalable, but a bit too simple, with no reporting capability or cross-datacenter replication capability.

The CouchDB product has a lot of features, but is too slow, unable to keep up with high loads and inability scale-out on it’s own.

The combination of the 2 will hit a sweet spot to allow developers to quickly get their apps up and running, along with the reliability, speed and low cost that make running it in production cheap and worry free.

Our 2.0 product is coming soon, adding CouchDB style views and reporting with a nifty trick for extremely fast failover while maintaining full coherency with the underling distributed data storage (we are calling it our B-Superstar index). We’ll of course have lighting fast reads (same as Memcached) but also very fast durable writes. For 2kb docs, we are currently getting sustained random insert/updates rates of 25k writes/sec, fully durable, with compaction in background so it can go all day and all night. We’ve got some more write work coming soon which we are hoping will give us another performance boost too before 2.0. Stay tuned.

And so right now the focus is on the features and customers that pay, a thing that allow us to build a real sustainable business. And that’s REAL DAMN IMPORTANT. It’s not enough to build some cool technology, not enough to build a community of excited technologist. You need to cross the chasm and build a real business. A business that provides support, training, documentation and of course a reliable product. A business you can call up when you have difficultly upgrading from an old version, or are getting some weird error you’ve never seen before at 3am. A business you know will be around to support you for years to come.

And so while we focus on the features and customers that most quickly make us a viable business (and it’s growing fast), we are still looking to build the features and technology to expand our use cases and, get customers and developers excited. Future versions are planned to have full CouchDB compatible replication technology, with the ability to support all sorts of mobile and embedded databases, such as our new TouchDB projects for iOS and Android. So with Couchbase you can have fast, scalable database in the cloud that also supports the offline use of thousands, or millions of apps on devices that drop in and out of internet connectivity, and can sync when connected but still completely usable when disconnected.

That’s some cool shit. Simple Fast Elastic. And Reliable. And Mobile. That’s why Couchbase.