Mountain View, Calif. – February 8, 2012 - Couchbase, Inc., the NoSQL market share leader, today announced the results of an industry survey conducted in December that shows growing adoption of NoSQL in 2012. According to the survey, the majority of the more than 1,300 respondents will fund NoSQL projects in the coming year, saying the technology is becoming more important or critical to their company’s daily operations. Respondents also indicated that the lack of flexibility/rigid schemas associated with relational technology was a primary driver toward NoSQL adoption. NoSQL databases are schema-less and allow users to easily change an application to support the changing needs of the business.

“Based on the results of this survey, it’s clear that NoSQL has moved beyond the experimentation phase,” said Bob Wiederhold, CEO, Couchbase. “We believe 2012 will be a breakout year for NoSQL database technology, with companies of all sizes investing in and leveraging it in deeper ways to meet the data management requirements of their applications.”

NoSQL 2012 Survey Highlights

Key data points from the Couchbase NoSQL survey include:

• Nearly half of the more than 1,300 respondents indicated they have funded NoSQL projects in the first half of this year. In companies with more than 250 developers, nearly 70% will fund NoSQL projects over the course of 2012.
• 49% cited rigid schemas as the primary driver for their migration from relational to NoSQL database technology. Lack of scalability and high latency/low performance also ranked highly among the reasons given for migrating to NoSQL  (see chart below for more details).
• 40% overall say that NoSQL is very important or critical to their daily operations, with another 37% indicating it is becoming more important.

   

  

As part of Couchbase’s survey, respondents identified current use cases, with results that demonstrate the diversification of application and industry adoption of NoSQL technology. Examples include:

• real-time tracking and segmentation of users for ad targeting
• disaster recovery
• inventory tracking
• manufacturing automation
• insurance underwriting
• multi-call center operations (with replication of production data)
• Twitter stream analysis

Additional Comments

Respondents were asked “What is your biggest expectation/hope for what NoSQL technology will do for you in 2012?” Verbatim responses (grouped topically) include:

• Schemas
  • “Free us from the problem of inflexible schemas that are hard to adapt to changing business requirements”
  • “Retire legacy rigid datastores and replace with more efficient, flexible stores”
  • “Insulate us from expensive schema changes. Simplify horizontal scaling”
• Replace RDBMS/become default database
  • Become an integral part of our daily operations and handle at least 30% of our transaction load”
  • “Replace as much as possible of Microsoft SQL Server”
  • “My hope is that I can finally stop using MySQL in 2012”
  • “Free us from Oracle? Increase performance?”
• Scalability/Performance
  • “Allow us to shard billions of documents across multiple commodity servers”
  • “Allow us to scale out rather than up, we’re starting to hit limits of MySQL replication and it’s just not handling the kind of data we’re transferring”
  • “Drive down cost, decrease latency”
  • “Higher performance, wring the most out of our servers”
• Speed and agility in app development
  • “Development agility in new applications”
  • “Faster development and less database contention”
  • “Help us deploy new features faster without having to manage SQL patch scripts and migrations”

Zusätzliche Ressourcen

• Read James Phillips’ blog on the survey findings
• Herunterladen NoSQL Drivers Chart (.png)
• Read the white paper: “Why NoSQL?”
• Herunterladen Couchbase Server NoSQL database
• Folgen Sie @Couchbase auf Twitter