Couchbase claims fourfold performance boost for DBaaS using a tenth of the memory

NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has updated the storage engine for its managed service claiming a fourfold increase in speed while using a tenth of the memory.

Couchbase is a document-oriented database that uses the JSON format. It is open source, licensed under Apache 2.0. Users include airline ticketing system Amadeus, European supermarket giant Carrefour, and Cisco.

In its latest release, the Capella database-as-a-service (DBaaS) includes a high-data density storage engine with new compute.

Jeff Morris, Couchbase VP of product marketing, said the storage engine, Magma, was designed to optimize memory consumption and minimize write amplification when documents are frequently changing.

"The use of this engine expands cluster node capacity to 10 TB, and improves memory consumption requirements by 90 percent. Magma is an excellent choice for larger databases and systems where documents mutate frequently," he said.

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Philip Lupercio, VP of technology at healthcare expense management firm BroadJump, said its use of the new DBaaS had halved its storage requirements and reduced total cost of ownership.

In July 2021, Couchbase moved to bring the database closer to its relational cousins when it launched "multi-statement SQL transactions," which means statements that commit or roll back together. The development, therefore, supports multi-document SQL transactions with "interactions in microseconds all within one unified database platform," the vendor claimed. ®

The other addition Couchbase hopes will convince devs to do more with its platform is a collection of features that give the schema-less database a schema-like feel. It does this through schema and table-like organizing structures called "scopes and collections."

Meanwhile, fellow NoSQL traveller Datastax has launched Stargate v2, an update to its API gateway for Apache Cassandra, the wide-column database.

First introduced in 2020, Stargate is designed to make Cassandra easily accessible to developers through access to a broad range of APIs including JSON, CQL, GraphQL, REST, and gRPC.

Ed Anuff, chief product officer at DataStax, told The Register: "Within the gateway, we transform the data model. For example, use Cassandra for storing documents data, just like you would use MongoDB, for example." ®