Couchbase courts developers with platform integration

Couchbase has introduced a slew of new features that analysts say could help make life easier for developers when using its NoSQL database.

The document-oriented database, which uses the JSON format and is open source, licensed under Apache 2.0, counts airline ticketing system Amadeus, European supermarket giant Carrefour, and Cisco among its user base.

In a effort to get closer to developers in their native habitat, the vendor has integrated its Capella database-as-a-service within the popular Netlify developer platform, and offered a new Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension.

The aim is to make it easier for developers and development teams to build so-called modern applications — read internet scale or web-native — on Capella.

Rachel Stephens, a senior analyst at RedMonk, told us developers didn't want to spend time operating and integrating separate elements of the application stack. "Capella's new developer platform integrations aims to address this widespread issue, minimizing the developer experience gap and allowing teams to focus on what they do best — writing code and solving problems," she said.

The combination of an IDE extension (VS Code) together with the Netlify app platform and Capella database service had the "potential to streamline how applications are written, delivered and run," she said.

Couchbase has also introduced a new time series array function in its support for JSON designed to address a broader set of use cases, including IoT and finance applications.

The vendor said that to use Capella in Netlify, developers would need to create a netlify.toml file and .env file, an approach familiar to developers already using Netlify. Another optional tool that can help developers using Netlify is Ottoman.js (ottomanjs.com), a JavaScript ODM that can let developers define document structure, build more maintainable code and map documents to application objects, Couchbase said.

In doing so, developers could potentially reduce complicated mappings from a relational database to objects in code. It would also allow developers to work SQL++, a similar language to the ubiquitous SQL in relational databases.

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Lara Greden, IDC research director, said it was a positive move in terms of enhancing the developer experience.

"Developer adoption is fundamentally about reducing the friction for a developer to make use of DBaaS's capabilities. Direct integration with application platforms and IDEs takes away the friction. Direct, native integrations are increasingly a critical part of any cloud service vendor's strategy to be a strong contender in the cloud ecosystem," she said.

In 2021, Couchbase 7.0 introduced schema-like features in the NoSQL database, in a move the vendor said would provide the flexibility and scale of NoSQL database with the semantics and structure of relational systems.

The move liberated the developer from the DBA, but it meant running queries on a pure document database that has no indexes, which was "very inefficient," according to one analyst.

Couchbase's latest update came on the back of a string of other database news over the last week which included:

• Distributed relational database Cockroach has introduced its database-as-a-service on Azure as well as multi-region capabilities for its consumption-based, auto-scaling offering, CockroachDB serverless.
• Yugabyte, which offers a PostgreSQL compatible front-end with a distributed relational database underneath, has introduced its 2.18 iteration, promising to ease the deployment of multi-region Kubernetes environments “at scale”, as well as simplify the management of the DBaaS.
• DataStax, the company which offers commercial products built around the open-source wide-column Cassandra database, has formed a partnership with AI startup ThirdAI in a bid to help users build large language models and other forms of generative AI technologies. ®