Couchbase Inc. is announcing a new release of its NoSQL database platform that goes after what it sees as growing “systems of engagement” opportunities as businesses turn up the focus on personalization and customer services.

The upgraded platform streamlines global deployments, improves security and provides greater development flexibility. Systems of engagement “incorporate technologies such as social media and the cloud to encourage and enable peer interaction,” according to the online dictionary whatis.com. They demand a level of flexibility that’s difficult for traditional relational databases to match, including support for unstructured information and the agility to handle multiple data streams.

“The schema flexibility in NoSQL plays a huge role in developing and bringing applications to market faster,” said Ravi Mayuram, senior vice president of engineering and products at Couchbase. “The first user and the millionth user should get same set of experience.” Among Couchbase’s customers are Pokemon Go developer Niantic Inc., which uses the database to match up a player’s location with game access points.

In addition to the enhancements noted above, the core on a Couchbase Server 4.6 adds built-in support for rich data structures including lists, maps, and sets, and integrated .NET application development. The server now supports time stamps for so-called “active-active” conflict resolution, in which data is continually replicated across servers in a global deployment to ensure that one canonical version of data is always available. Updates to Couchbase’s N1QL query language for JavaScript Object Notation provide better performance at scale. Developers are getting rich data structure support for lists, maps, other non-traditional data types.

Other enhancements include:

• Couchbase Sync Gateway 1.4, adds an accelerator that enables customers to “scale to millions to devices with hundreds of thousands of concurrent interactions,” Mayuram said. That’s roughly a tenfold improvement over the previous version. The capability is particularly useful in internet of things applications.
• Couchbase Kafka Connector 3.0 provides greater scalability, performance optimizations and streaming reliability between Apache Kafka and other systems, as well as a new Sink Connector, which allows data from Kafka topics to be persisted directly into Couchbase Server. Kafka is a widely used messaging protocol for streaming applications.
• Couchbase Spark Connector 2.0 adds support for Apache Spark 2.0 and its overhauled streaming application program interface, offering a better way to continuously analyze operational data and enabling Couchbase to serve as both a Spark structured streaming sink and source.

Mayuram said Couchbase’s principal differentiation points from its chief rival, MongoDB, are now global conflict resolution, native mobile development and the query optimizer in N1QL. But he noted that the company is less focused on competitors than the rapid growth in the market. “A couple of years ago we saw the trend growing toward enterprises adopting NoSQL, but now people are moving in droves,” he said.

The product is distributed with an open-source license and subscription pricing for software updates, hot fixes, maintenance releases and product support. Pricing starts at $5,600 per node.

Image courtesy of Couchbase