CouchDB, an Apache Software Foundation project, is a fan favorite among many NoSQL developers who laud its local replication and support for many devices which suit it for mobile app development. But Katz said the time has come for change, and his rationale appears to stem from concerns he has about the open-source development model itself. According to his blog:

With Apache CouchDB, much of the focus has been around creating a consensus based, developer community that helps govern and move the project forward. Apache has done, and is doing a good job of that. But for us, it’s no longer enough. CouchDB was something I created because I thought an easy to use, peer based, replicating document store was something the world would find useful. And it proved a lot of the ideas were possible and useful and it’s been successful beyond my wildest ambitions. But if I had it all to do again, I’d do many things different.

Going forward, Katz will focus on Couchbase Server 2.0, and rewrite more of its core services in C/C++ rather than Erlang.  ”Most of the performance sensitive portions [of CouchBase] will be moving to over C code. Erlang is still a great language, but when you need top performance and low level control, C is hard to beat,” Katz wrote.

He said the new product will build on previous Apache CouchDB and Membase projects, but his team will jettison what doesn’t work and focus on a design for “mission critical deployment and mobile integration.” Katz said that work can move faster and be more responsive to customers than a “community based project.”

Hello Couchbase 2.0, bye-bye Couchbase Single Server

News of Katz’ decision came as Couchbase discontinued CouchDB-based Couchbase Single Server, citing self-inflicted market confusion. According to a company post:

In addition to Membase Server and our new mobile products we also offered Couchbase Single Server which was a packaged “distribution” of Apache CouchDB. On top of that we began releasing developer previews of Couchbase Server 2.0, which incorporated CouchDB technology into Membase Server – but this product was not compatible with Couchbase Single Server (or CouchDB). If you are confused just reading this you get the point – and so do we.

News of Katz’ transition sparked a lively debate on Hacker News. Some defended CouchDB as a valid NoSQL choice while others said business users need more professional support than was available with CouchDB. Some commenters slammed Katz for disrespecting the project that brought him fame. Several of the participants worried that Couchbase Server represents a “fork” of the CouchDB code base.

One commenter, Rubyrescue, wrote:

“This is business, pure and simple. I had a long, LONG series of emails and calls with Couchbase about commercial support for Couch. We have some big production apps on it. When it got down to time to pay for support, they told me (this is 2 months ago) in a rare and unusual bit of candor, that they were going to drop Couch in less than six months, so did I want to buy commercial support for just six months? I told them not only do I not want commercial support, but I just got so freaked out I would not recommend Couch for future projects to clients, because it was obvious that internally the team had moved on.”

What’s the migration plan?

Others complained that there doesn’t appear to be an easy CouchDB-to-Couchbase Server migration path or they would consider doing that.

The tension between open source and commercial software development is a persistent undercurrent in the tech arena. Open source proponents love having a large, democratic community contribute expertise both on actual coding and for support. Others say that’s all fine and good, but real businesses need a real, professional and paid support — an actual number to call for help. In this case it appears that the open source model took one on the chin.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user quinn.anya

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

The new product is called DataStax Enterprise, and it melds the Cassandra database with Hadoop and DataStax’s existing OpsCenter product. Essentially, it sounds a lot like Brisk, the Hadoop distribution DataStax announced at our Structure: Big Data conference in March, only with some additional management features and enterprise fine tuning. What that means is a product designed to deliver real-time application performance and heavy-duty analytics on the same physical infrastructure, with both workloads benefiting from each other’s presence. If need be, Hadoop gets speedy access to web data, as do web applications to Hadoop data.

DataStax OpsCenter

Hopefully for DataStax, though, the new product — DataStax’s first commercial release other than its OpsCenter management tool — will put Cassandra back in the limelight. DataStax is pushing the analytics angle pretty hard, and that could turn out to be a smart decision in a very crowded NoSQL space. Tying in the Hadoop (plus Hive) integration make DataStax Enterprise stand out as almost a high-speed unstructured data warehouse on top of Cassandra’s proven reputation as a database for real-time, webscale applications.

Cassandra was an early darling in the NoSQL space — in large part because of its Facebook roots — but it has been somewhat overshadowed recently by projects such as CouchDB, MongoDB and HBase that have garnered lots of press and big-time users.  The former two have commercial versions in place and are finding large-enterprise traction thanks to Couchbase and 10gen respectively, and even Facebook chose HBase over Cassandra to power numerous new features such as Messaging, real-time analytics and its “social inbox.” Couchbase and 10gen have also raised a lot of money recently, to the tunes of $14 million and $20 million, respectively, in the last two months.

DataStax also is rolling out a DataStax Community Edition today, which is a more-polished version of the free, open source Apache Cassandra distribution. Both products will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• A near-term outlook for big data

Ben Black (left) and Tim Anglade (right)

Database have never really been sexy. They’re important. They’re necessary, but they’ve never really been sexy, except for possibly a brief, shining moment in 2010 and perhaps a bit of 2011, when every reader of Hacker News was sharing his or her experience and every coder on GitHub was playing with a way to access data. The NoSQL movement had hit its stride.

But for those of us on the outside, the conversations about Cassandra, HBase, Hive and MongoDB are hard to parse, maybe even unintelligible. But if you really want to know, there’s a website that can help. The NoSQL Tapes is a collection of videos shot by Tim Anglade in a journey around the world made last summer to discuss what was happening in data storage and access.

The tapes, which have attracted 17,000 unique visitors to the site, are well done and can offer a good overview of technologies from specific (Mike Miller on MapReduce) to general (Ben Black on NoSQL and cloud computing). They are helpful primers on their various topics, but they also capture a moment in tech history when a disparate group of engineers got together to build tools using open source software. The videos showcase the use cases for technology as well as attempt to engage people on the technical merits of each project, as opposed to a bunch of marketing speak.

As Anglade told me in a conversation, these videos represent a time before NoSQL “moved toward the enterprise” and became overrun with marketing. Now an evangelist at Cloudant, which offers a platform for CouchDB, Anglade recalls his summer of running around interviewing technologists fondly. The site launched in January, and so far Anglade has put up about 20 videos and has about 20 more to process and put on the site (although not all of those may make the grade). At about an hour-long, the videos on the site represent a huge time commitment, and the NoSQL community has been the primary audience.

However, there are videos that have proven popular such as Black’s or Jason Hunter and Eric Bloch of MarkLogic on when NoSQL makes senses for large corporations, that just about any business or technologist trying to understand why NoSQL is a big deal could learn from. Check it out, as a resource, and as a snapshot of the moment data became sexy.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Big Data 2011 Preview

When I spoke with Membase Co-Founder James Phillips and CouchOne Co-Founder Damien Katz, the two emphasized the complementary nature of their products. Membase provides a scalable front-end caching component, while CouchOne provides a full-featured document database, combining to create what Phillips calls a “powerhouse” NoSQL offering that addresses both high-level and low-level needs. The companies’ user bases are a good fit, too, as Membase has a strong presence among large-scale web sites and gaming applications, while CouchOne has carved out a niche among mobile-application developers. Now, Phillips noted, Couchbase customers can feel confident in their abilities to serve both web and mobile application users from a single data platform.

The new company will offer four products, which it describes in the official announcement as follows:

• Elastic Couchbase [Membase Server]: Membase Server, to be renamed Elastic Couchbase in a forthcoming release, will combine Membase, memcached and CouchDB technology to provide high-performance caching, elastic clustering and document database features. It can effortlessly scale from a single server to a hundred-node cluster supporting an application with millions of concurrent users.
• Couchbase: A lightweight, non-clustered Couchbase edition appropriate for developers and smaller Couchbase production deployments.
• Mobile Couchbase: Initially focused on the iOS platform, Mobile Couchbase is a database embeddable into native iOS applications. Mobile Couchbase provides data management services to applications whether offline or online, and can be configured to automatically synchronize with other Couchbase instances when network connectivity is established.
• Hosted Couchbase: Hosted Couchbase is a quick and easy way to get started with Couchbase, and provides a ready-made cloud sync point for applications built using Mobile Couchbase.

Membase CEO Bob Wiederhold will maintain CEO duties for the new company, and Katz will maintain the CTO role he held at CouchOne.

After accounting for big-data-focused NoSQL vendors such as fellow CouchDB proprietor Cloudant, Phillips believes Couchbase, Cassandra (commercialized by DataStax) and MongoDB (commercialized by 10gen) are the last three NoSQL databases standing for “real-time interactive” applications. Obviously, he thinks Couchbase will be the one to thrive the most, although it’s not only because of the technology. He pointed to Couchbase’s alliances with ecosystem partners such as Cloudera in big data analytics and Heroku, RightScale and Microsoft in cloud computing, as well as the company’s intent to be “very bullish in this market.”

Phillips added that further consolidation probably will be necessary if other NoSQL databases are to give Couchbase a run for its money, and I think he’s correct to a degree. At the least, other NoSQL vendors might be wise to establish strong strategic partners both with themselves and with companies in other areas of the broad data market in order to make users’ experiences as easy and as rich as possible. DataStax and 10gen are both doing just fine for themselves and are doing good work to advance their respective projects, but if 10gen CEO Dwight Merriman is correct that “[t]he NoSQL space is one space” and that “no one is going to use eight different tools for eight different problems,” then any success the seemingly promising Couchbase experiences because of its holistic product and partner approach will be to the detriment of its competitors.

To hear more about NoSQL, particularly for handling big data, be sure to attend our upcoming Structure Big Data conference on March 23 in New York City, where 10gen CEO Dwight Merriman will be among the participants.

Footsteps image courtesy of Flickr user CarbonNYC.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Report: NoSQL Databases — Providing Extreme Flexibility and Scale
• With Scalable Data Stores Around, Is NoSQL a Non-Starter?
• The Incredible, Growing Commercial Hadoop Market

ARM Virtualization Tech Adds More Fuel to Server Fire (From Ars Technica) It sounds like this might be targeted more toward mobile chips than server chips, but the path seems clear. Assuming ARM-based servers catch on, the next step will be virtualizing them.

Dell – Ready to Challenge HP and IBM for the High Ground? (From Forrester) Dell is on the forefront of everybody’s mind lately with its constant movement and ballooning server sales. Its prospects are looking very good right now.

Why Large Hadron Collider Scientists are Using CouchDB (From ReadWriteWeb) The previous link suggests that CouchDB and MongoDB seem to have more production customers. Count CERN among them, although I don’t know what this news means for its use of MongoDB.

HP Buys Stratavia for Application Automation (From Data Center Knowledge) Automation is a critical part of next-generation data centers and application environments, so Stratavia is a good buy for HP. The application and database focus complements what HP is doing. 

For more cloud-related news analysis and research, visit GigaOM Pro.

According to Couch.io executives, applications — web or native — can use CouchDB’s peer-to-peer sync capabilities to build more engaging experiences. In addition, syncing allows the apps to work in an offline mode or when wireless Internet connections are very slow.

Syncing on mobile is still a challenge and many companies have tried and failed to do it right. With this new offering, Couch.io actually might be onto something practical. Now all they need to do is find developers who want to incorporate the technology into their Android apps.

Related Post from GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d.): NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility.