Although it has grown tremendously over the last few years against the backdrop of the explosion in unstructured information, the database market still has a lot of white space left to fill, much of it in mobile. As a consequence that product gap, app developers often have no choice but to compromise.

There exist plenty of systems built from the ground up to support applications running on smartphones and tablets, but practically all of them are relational, an architecture that is inherently unable to keep up with the growing amounts of user-generated content and other schemaless data produced within mobile services today. The problem is most of the platforms that are capable of effectively handling such workloads were developed with entirely different use cases in mind, which creates technical potholes developers would rather avoid.

Couchbase, the startup behind the open source database of the same name, hopes to flip the status quo on its head with a new toolkit aimed at eliminating the data management trade-off that has been holding back the mobile development community.

The first component of the recently introduced Couchbase Mobile suite is an embedded database that is lightweight enough to run locally, eliminating the need to transmit information to a remote server at the cost of increased latency, but still delivers the full breadth of functionality users require. Besides the features of the standard server-side edition, Couchbase Lite also packs multi-master replication and conflict resolution plus data encryption both in motion and at rest.

The platform is available in native versions for both Android and iOS as well as a Java release that works across multiple operating systems. Additionally, Couchbase is collaborating with application portability specialist  Xamarin to rewrite the database in .NET, an initiative that entered its beta testing phase in conjunction with the debut of the mobile suite.

If a task is too resource-consuming to be carried out  locally, application data can be uploaded to the cloud through the new Sync Gateway, which enables direct replication between Couchbase Lite and backend deployments of the database. The integrated tool can also be used to automate authentication, access control, data filtering and change validation, functionality that developers would otherwise either have to implement on their own or turn to a third party provider for, introducing unnecessary complexities to their apps.

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