Aerospike takes swipe at document databases JSON support

Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike has added support for JSON documents to a slew of new features included in its Database 6 release.

The value-key database has established its niche by touting high throughput, low latency and global scalability. It is adding support for the document format in a bid to broaden use cases and take on document database specialists Couchbase and MongoDB.

Lenley Hensarling, chief product officer, said some customers were supporting as many as 13 billion transactions per day on Aerospike. Support for JSON document models, the Java programming models, and JSONPath query would help users store, search, and better manage complex data sets and workloads.

"Many times, we replace the standard solutions in this space due to their inability to maintain consistent predictable performance as the data scales, but perhaps more importantly the number of concurrent transactions scales.

Hensarling added: "There starts to be a wider variance in the latency as one scales across one or more of these vectors. That variance winds up affecting the Service Level Agreements in response times, decisioning windows, and transactions.

"While there are a number of 'document' data stores, there are very few that can deal with the true variance in loads that the internet presents. Aerospike handles that. Now enterprises needn't rewrite their JSON / JSONPath applications to gain that advantage," he told The Register.

Holger Mueller, vice president, Constellation Research, said some enterprises would commonly use Aerospike and a separate document DB, such as MongoDB or Couchbase. "If both are needed in one application, it gets complicated. So having one database, one license, and one performance to manage leads to simplifications.

"Aerospike has become bigger and better: it has an impressive innovation track record and it has become a multimodal database player while keeping its high performance," he said.

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However, the company was "still small", Mueller said. "They will need to deliver to become the trusted partner of more large corporations – this is an important step."

While Aerospike focuses on low latency — and is used in adtech and fraud detection — document databases have been focused on the type of data users can store.

They have not stood still either. Last year Couchbase launched its 7.0 release which offers multi-statement SQL transactions and an approach to building schema-like structures into the database, allowing it to support multiple applications from the same data.

Aerospike can support SQL — the more or less universal query language. Users have to employ the Aerospike Connect for Presto, which works with Presto/Trino data mesh SQL solutions, to give SQL access to the data in Aerospike Clusters. ®