NoSQL has been a developing trend for quite some time now, both in the enterprise and in the general developer community.  It has several advantages MySQL currently lacks, including that it’s non-relational, distributed, open, and has the capacity to scale out.  This is what makes it ideal for managing unstructured data, which is the main driver behind the numbers, as purported in a study by Evans Data Corp.

Evans Data found that 56 percent of enterprise developers  report some use of NoSQL, while 63 percent plan on leveraging it within the next two years.  Forty-three percent of the respondents that were a part of the general developer community said they expect to use NoSQL in the next two years.

This demand by developers spurred several accelerating NoSQL companies, and a lot of attention from VC’s. One of those companies, Couchbase, had a big launch last month followed by a funding round a couple days ago.

^{Last month Couchbase} unveiled a new language dedicated to unstructured data called UnQL, that was developed in partnership with SQLite.  Just a week after the debut of UnQL, or Unstructured Query Language, Couchbase announced it has secured $14 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Ignition Partners with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Other companies are jumping on the NoSQL bandwagon, too. Open-source BI software maker Pentaho made the latest push in its big data strategy, and announced support for several Hadoop distributions including Cloudera and Greenplum; MongoBD, HBase; and several analytics databases such as LucidBD and Teradata.

NoSQL has been making progress, and the same can be said of MySQL. Oracle began offering early developer access to MySQL 5.6 late last month.