Archives: Press Releases

Mountain View, Calif. – September 1, 2011 – Couchbase, the leading NoSQL database company, today announced a worldwide tour of CouchConf developer conferences, taking place over the next six months in six major cities: New York City, Chicago, Berlin, Bangalore, Tel Aviv and Tokyo.

“Following the recent success of CouchConf in San Francisco, we are now bringing one-day events to developers across the globe, giving users everywhere the opportunity to learn and network with others in the Couch community,” said Damien Katz, Couchbase CTO and creator of Apache CouchDB. “Interest in Couch technology is soaring, especially with the recent developer preview of Couchbase Server 2.0, and we are excited to provide the community with in-depth technical sessions, how-to sessions on development and deployment, and first-hand information on what’s coming next on the Couchbase roadmap.”

Conference dates and online registration are available on the CouchConf World Tour website, where attendees can purchase early bird tickets and also get call for papers information.

Conference Agenda Highlights:

• Technology updates and a look ahead from Couchbase technologists
• New product demonstrations including Couchbase Server 2.0 and Couchbase Mobile
• A technically rich core agenda, packed with breakout sessions on Couchbase and related technologies (Apache CouchDB, Membase, Memcached) including:
  • Intro to Document Databases
  • Developing with Couchbase
  • Querying and Indexing
  • Best Practices for Good Document Design
  • Couchbase in Production 24×7
  • Database Synchronization and Replication
  • Mobile App Development and CouchSync
• Application stories and best practice sessions from the community
• Hacking and networking opportunities in the Couchbase Lounge and After Party

Conference Locations and Dates:

• CouchConf NYC: October 24, 2011
• CouchConf Berlin: November 7, 2011
• CouchConf Chicago: November 16, 2011
• CouchConf Bangalore: December 7, 2011
• CouchConf Israel: December 19, 2011
• CouchConf Tokyo: January 2012

Additional Online Resources

• Register for a CouchConf event
• Sponsor a CouchConf event
• Download Couchbase Server 2.0 Developer Preview
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter
• Like Couchbase on Facebook

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – August 10, 2011 – Couchbase, the leading NoSQL database company, today announced it has secured $14 million in a Series C round of financing led by venture capital firm Ignition Partners with participation from the company’s existing investors Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, and North Bridge Venture Partners. The company has also reserved an additional $1 million for investment from strategic customers and partners. The new funding will be used to further invest in NoSQL product development, support the adoption and growth of Couchbase in enterprise organizations, and support international expansion.

Funding Highlights

• On the heels of its inaugural CouchConf developer conference, held July 29 in San Francisco with more than 300 attendees from around the world, Couchbase announced a Series C round of financing, bringing the company’s total funding to $30 million.
• Building upon the merger of Membase and CouchOne in February and the announcement last week of Couchbase Server 2.0, the company’s first integrated product release, Couchbase will use the new funding to accelerate the delivery of simple, fast and elastic NoSQL database technologies, grow the company in the enterprise market, and expand internationally.
• Couchbase will also dedicate resources to support its rapidly growing community through expanded technical education and community events

Supporting Quotes

• “Since Couchbase released its first NoSQL database products last October, their business has grown rapidly and they have emerged as the leader in the NoSQL database market,” said Frank Artale, general partner of Ignition Partners.  “Couchbase’s document-oriented NoSQL database, proven ability to scale from one to hundreds of nodes, and its unique mobile strategy give the company a clear advantage as market growth accelerates.”
• “The growth of Couchbase’s business, production deployments, and community over a short period of time has been remarkable,” said Kevin Efrusy, general partner of Accel.  “The use of NoSQL database technology is quickly expanding beyond internet-based Web 2.0 companies to enterprises.  As more companies increasingly become aware of NoSQL success stories, we expect the market to continue to expand rapidly – and Couchbase is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that expansion.”
• “Since the merger that formed Couchbase earlier this year, the adoption and production deployments of Couchbase technology has been very strong and accelerating,” said Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase. “With the recent release of Couchbase Server 2.0, our groundbreaking NoSQL solution, we expect our business to accelerate even further. The additional financing gives us the ability to invest more aggressively in this rapidly growing market and continue to anticipate and meet the needs of customers who rely on Couchbase NoSQL technology.”

Additional Resources

• Visit www.couchbase.com
• Download Couchbase Server 2.0
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter
• Read Couchbase blog

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – CouchConf San Francisco – July 29, 2011 – Couchbase, the leading NoSQL database company, and SQLite, maker of the world’s most widely deployed SQL database engine, today announced the release into the public domain of a jointly developed NoSQL query language. Unstructured Data Query Language, or UnQL (pronounced “Uncle”), is a collaborative effort to bring a familiar and standardized data definition and manipulation language to the NoSQL domain. Both Couchbase and SQLite have committed to delivering products that embody the language. Available at www.unqlspec.org, further development of the language is open to participation from users, vendors and the academic community.

News Highlights:

• UnQL is SQL-like in syntax, providing familiarity for application developers who grew up with that language, while providing additional capabilities to allow for selection and manipulation of complex document structures.
   
• Damien Katz, Couchbase founder and inventor of CouchDB, the most widely deployed NoSQL database engine and D. Richard Hipp, inventor of SQLite, the most widely deployed SQL database engine led the initial efforts on UnQL. Both are committed to the implementation of UnQL in forthcoming product releases.  
• Selecting and operating on self-describing documents without a rigidly defined schema requires expressiveness unavailable in today’s SQL database solutions. With UnQL, developers get the structured table format of the relational database model plus the added flexibility of the NoSQL schema-free design.

Supporting Quotes:

• Damien Katz, Couchbase CTO and creator of CouchDB: “The work we’ve done on UnQL has been very gratifying. UnQL stems from our belief that a common query language is necessary to drive NoSQL adoption in the same way SQL drove adoption in the relational database market. I look forward to continuing my work alongside SQLite to push this new language forward.”
   
• D. Richard Hipp, inventor of SQLite: “Relational database technology – and the SQL query language – have served us very well for over forty years, but modern applications require far more flexibility at the data layer than those of generations past. UnQL builds upon our experience with SQL, supplementing that language with syntax and concepts appropriate for the unstructured, self-describing data formats of post-modern applications.”
   
• Erik Meijer, Partner Architect, Microsoft: “One of the main arguments in our recent CACM article on coSQL was the industry needs a common query language and data model to feed the ecosystem for key-value stores. The UnQL language presents an important practical next step in this process. We are looking forward to working with Couchbase and other industry leaders in the NoSQL space on taking the design to the next level.”
   
• Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst, RedMonk: “One of the primary use cases for non-relational databases is the storage and retrieval of unstructured information. What’s been lacking has been a standardized interface to this data, an unstructured equivalent to SQL. UnQL aims to address precisely this problem.”

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about UnQL at www.unqlspec.org
• Visit www.couchbase.org
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter
• Read the Couchbase blog

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – CouchConf San Francisco – July 29, 2011 – Couchbase, the leading NoSQL database company, today released a developer preview of Couchbase Server 2.0, the company’s high-performance, highly scalable, document-oriented NoSQL database. Couchbase Server 2.0 combines the unmatched elastic data management capabilities of Membase Server with the distributed indexing, querying and mobile synchronization capabilities of Apache CouchDB, the most widely deployed open source document database, to deliver the industry’s most powerful, bullet-proof NoSQL database technology.

News Highlights:

• Couchbase Server 2.0 integrates the industry’s most trusted and widely deployed open source data management technologies – CouchDB, Membase, and Memcached – to deliver the industry’s most powerful, reliable NoSQL database.
  • As the new foundational data storage technology for Couchbase 2.0, CouchDB reliably stores data without the corruption risk inherent in competing approaches. It also provides powerful indexing and distributed query capabilities.
  • Membase components contribute powerful cluster management technology, which enables linear scale-out of the data layer from one to 50 to hundreds of nodes as already proven in the world’s largest NoSQL production deployments.  It also provides the enterprise-class management, monitoring, and alerting capabilities critical to operationally managing production data tiers.
  • Memcached, built into Couchbase Server, powers in-memory caching that enables consistently low-latency and high throughput, with sub-millisecond  data reads and writes.
• Couchbase Server 2.0 is a member of the Couchbase family of interoperable database servers – which also includes Couchbase Single Server and Couchbase Mobile. Unique to Couchbase, “CouchSync” technology allows each of these database systems to synchronize its data with any other. For example, mobile applications built with Couchbase Mobile can automatically synchronize data with a cloud- or datacenter-deployed Couchbase cluster whenever network connectivity is available.
   
• Couchbase also announced its new Couchbase Certification Program. Recognizing that NoSQL database technology is increasingly being viewed as a core component in the modern web application development stack, Couchbase’s new program is designed to help developers and administrators demonstrate proficiency in the leading NoSQL database technology. The first certification exams for the new program were administered this week in conjunction with CouchConf San Francisco, the company’s developer conference.

Supporting Quotes

• Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO: “The demand for NoSQL software continues to rise, and we are thrilled to be at the forefront of this dramatic shift in database technology. Hundreds of customers have deployed Couchbase in production, taking advantage of the ease of use and elastic scalability unique to our solution. Today’s release of Couchbase Server 2.0 provides an even more compelling solution for interactive web and mobile applications, and we’re excited to get it into the hands of our users.”
• Curt Monash, President of Monash Research and Editor of DBMS 2: “There are use cases in which CouchDB and now Couchbase clobber competitors with respect to programming ease. And if you want to adopt memcached, Couchbase has become the obvious choice of technology stack.”
• Drew Garner, Director of Architecture Services, Concur: “Deploying Couchbase solutions gives us greater scalability and blazing performance (sub-millisecond response times). We now have the ability to simply and fluidly increase capacity, enabling us to seamlessly respond to the needs of the application. Couchbase 2.0 adds indexing and querying to this mix – and we are looking forward to the added flexibility and power the new release provides..”
• Shawn Chiao, Tribal Crossing Co-Founder: “What we appreciate most about Couchbase is the company’s commitment to deliver simplicity and elasticity in its database solutions. Our user base has tripled since we first deployed the technology, yet we’ve been able to scale seamlessly and manage our rapidly growing application without the need for a dedicated administrator. Couchbase Server 2.0 gives us even more to love, with robust and tried-and-true CouchDB technology at the core and the ability to view and filter data in ways that deliver even more value to our organization.”
• Issac Roth, PaaS Master at Red Hat: “Red Hat’s OpenShift is a Platform-as-a-Service that makes it easier for developers to deploy and auto-scale the frameworks, middleware and data sources of their choice in the cloud.  In line with the availability of Couchbase Server 2.0, we are announcing the availability of a Couchbase cartridge in OpenShift.  Developers can now gain a flexible and scalable data store to build, run and manage applications at web scale in the cloud.”
• Mark Baker, Product Management, Canonical:  “Businesses today are dealing with ever larger unstructured data sets and Ubuntu offers the flexibility to scale to meet changing demands. The combination of Couchbase Server 2.0 and the Ubuntu operating system can bring organizations high availability, excellent performance and scalability, and truly enterprise-class support to handle their data management challenges, whether in the data center or the public cloud.”

Additional Resources:

• Get Couchbase Server 2.0 developer preview
• Sign up for the Couchbase Server 2.0 Technical Webinar Series
• Visit www.couchbase.com
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter

Mountain View, Calif. – June 8, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced the general availability of Membase Server 1.7, the simple, fast, elastic NoSQL database designed and optimized for the data management needs of interactive web applications. A major new release of the software, Membase Server 1.7 offers a host of features and capabilities that provide even greater simplicity, scalability, and availability to make the system even more robust and production ready than any other NoSQL solution on the market.

News Highlights

• Membase Server 1.7 delivers numerous enhancements, many of which reflect the most-requested features from customers using the system in large-scale cluster environments. Key new features include:
  • Advanced cluster monitoring capabilities. Widely considered the most “production ready” of the NoSQL database solutions, Membase Server takes operational readiness to a whole new level with the most robust instrumentation and monitoring capability available. (See the video blog to see the new monitoring capabilities in action across a 100-node Membase Server cluster.) Nearly seven dozen system parameters are now tracked and displayed in real time, including historical trend data over a variety of time periods. Administrators gain insight into system behavior and performance, permitting capacity planning, early detection of trends that could lead to degraded performance and rapid troubleshooting of problems to ensure continuous availability of the database.
  • Built-in alerting. New functionality notifies administrators when critical system parameters are out of their expected range, increasing uptime without requiring constant administrator attention.
  • In-place upgrade support through package management systems. This feature dramatically simplifies upgrades by working with native package management systems to perform all upgrade steps and move data to the new version. Membase Server 1.7 also provides notification through the management console when a new upgrade is available.
  • Improved rebalance capability. Membase Server 1.7 improves safety during rebalance while minimizing data movement across the network, resulting in reduced network bandwidth and increased robustness of the rebalancing process, both crucial in today’s cloud environments.
     
• Membase Server 1.7 binary packages, both Enterprise and Community Editions, as well as source code are available for download. More information on all Couchbase technologies can be found at the recently unveiled couchbase.org, home of the Couchbase open source community.
   
• Membase open source technology provides a distributed key-value database with integrated memcached caching technology, enabling dynamic cluster elasticity and sustained low-latency, high-throughput data operations. Its core technology powers 18 of the top 20 largest websites; and few web applications now enter production without it. Organizations such as Zynga, AOL and ShareThis use Membase Server to dramatically lower data management costs while improving the scalability and performance of their demanding interactive web applications.

Supporting Quotes

• Mazdak Rezvani, VP of engineering for Chango, a Toronto-based search retargeting business: “Membase is an important part of our ability to serve ads with lightning fast speed. We count on the power of Membase for the performance and availability of our ad operations, but also rely on its monitoring capabilities to provide the window we need into the system – in fact we have the graphs open all day. We love the new and beautiful GUI features Membase Server 1.7 provides, and are excited to roll it into production.” 
   
• Frank Weigel, director of product management, Couchbase: “Our production users are hungry for advanced features in scalability and operational readiness – and Membase Server 1.7 delivers on both. Enhanced elasticity makes it even easier and more transparent to scale out and rebalance your cluster, while comprehensive monitoring and alerting gives even greater visibility into the ongoing cluster health and status. With these advancements, Couchbase continues to lead the way in production readiness and maturity among NoSQL databases.”

Additional Online Resources

• Download Membase Server 1.7
• See the video blog: new GUI features monitoring a 100-node Membase Server cluster
• Read the blog about the new operations in Membase Server 1.7
• Visit couchbase.org for more technical details or for source
• Follow @couchbase on twitter
• Attend CouchConf

About Membase Server

A part of the Couchbase product family, Membase Server is the industry’s lowest latency, highest throughput NoSQL database. A distributed key-value data store, Membase Server is designed and optimized for the data management needs of interactive web applications. It allows the database layer to scale out just like the web application logic tier – simply by adding more commodity servers. 

Mountain View, Calif. – June 1, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that Concur, a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, has implemented Membase Server to laterally scale its software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. With Membase Server, Concur is simplifying its data management process and easily scaling out to keep pace with its cloud services that process more than $50 billion in travel and expenses for global corporations per year.

News Highlights

• 20 percent increase in application performance. Concur initially created a custom system to manage the data layer of its SaaS, which turned out to be too expensive and complicated to scale. The company turned to Membase Server to help laterally scale their application, and support their plans to utilize NoSQL technology extensively throughout their stack. This is just the tip of the iceberg for Concur, as they are working to further integrate the technology for even more performance and scalability benefits.

• Cluster management capabilities with zero downtime.Concur can scale out their Membase Server cluster with zero downtime by simply adding nodes on the fly. The .NET and Java clients automatically update in response to a topology change, ensuring smooth and consistent growth of the Membase cluster across the entire environment. Concur was impressed with the simplicity with which they could setup, configure and scale the cluster.  

• Part of the most comprehensive and widely deployed NoSQL database family.Couchbase products represent the most comprehensive family of NoSQL database solutions for building scalable web and mobile applications.Built from proven open source data management technologies, including Apache CouchDB, Membase and Memcached, Couchbase products are in large-scale production at hundreds of companies including AOL, ShareThis and Zynga. In addition, Apache CouchDB is deployed across 10 million desktops worldwide, and at organizations such as the BBC, Canonical and Mozilla.

Supporting Quotes

•  Drew Garner, Director of Architecture Services at Concur: “Deploying Couchbase solutions gives us greater scalability and blazing performance with sub-millisecond response times. We now have the ability to simply and fluidly increase capacity, enabling us to seamlessly respond to the needs of the application.”
   
• Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase: “We’re excited that Concur has chosen Membase Server to scale their SaaS application – and ultimately provide a better interactive experience for their customers. Concur’s implementation illustrates how Membase Server’s low latency and fast response times make it ideal for organizations in need of scalable data infrastructure to support their cloud-based services.”

Additional Online Resources:

• Read the Concur case study
• Download Membase Server
• Read the Couchbase blog
• Attend CouchConf San Francisco
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter

Mountain View, Calif. – May 19, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that it has been named to GigaOM’s inaugural Structure 50 list, honoring leading cloud computing and infrastructure companies. Selected in a rigorous review by GigaOM editors, the Structure 50 list encompasses a wide range of recent entrants and established industry leaders.

“The Structure 50 companies are changing the face of computing. The editors at GigaOM reviewed hundreds of companies to identify the leaders in cloud computing based on product innovation, market impact, technology development and visionary leadership,” said Derrick Harris, GigaOM Structure Editor and Conference Chair. “The inaugural Structure 50 list recognizes the enormous contribution these companies are making to business, technology and society.”

“We are excited to be among the leading cloud computing and infrastructure companies selected by GigaOM, an organization that has been at the forefront of the cloud computing industry since its inception and in a position to recognize true innovation,” said Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO. “This recognition highlights the momentum of the NoSQL database market and validates Couchbase’s unique approach, which combines cloud and mobile database technologies – including transparent data synchronization across the entire Couchbase family of products – to meet customers’ rapidly growing need to harness the potential of cloud and mobile computing for competitive advantage.”

The Structure 50 companies will be recognized at the GigaOM Structure 2011 conference, June 22-23, in San Francisco. In its fourth year, Structure 2011 is a must-attend cloud computing and Internet infrastructure industry event for executives, investors, entrepreneurs, and technology decision makers. For more information on Structure 2011 and a complete list of the 2011 Structure 50 companies, visit http://event.gigaom.com/structure.

About GigaOM

Founded in 2006, GigaOM has grown into the leading provider of online media, events and research for global technology innovators. The company is one of the most credible and insightful voices at the intersection of business and technology, with an online audience of more than 4 million monthly unique visitors; industry-leading events, including Structure, Mobilize, NewTeeVee Live, Net:Work, Green:Net, and Structure Big Data; and a pioneering market research service and digital community, GigaOM Pro, which provides insider access to expert analysis on emerging technology markets.

Additional Couchbase Resources

Read the Couchbase blog
Follow @Couchbase on Twitter
Attend CouchConf San Francisco

Mountain View, Calif. – May 16, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that The Knot Inc. (NASDAQ: KNOT), the premier media company devoted to weddings, nesting and babies, has implemented Membase Server as a centralized caching solution to handle hundreds of millions of online visitors to its popular web properties. With Membase Server, The Knot is simplifying its data management process, accelerating data access and easily scaling out to keep pace with its growing user base.

News Highlights

• With hundreds of millions monthly page views, mostly database-driven, performance and scaling its applications were critical for The Knot’s operations. In its early years, The Knot built its own customized caching, but with web traffic reaching significant levels in recent years, the company turned to memcached, a fast, in-memory caching system, used by 18 of the top 20 websites for scalability at the data layer.
• While initially running its own memcached instances appeared to help, The Knot’s technical team realized quickly it was not a long-term solution: there were single points of failure, it required more resources than provisioned and it lacked an easy-to-use management interface.
• The Knot evaluated Membase Server, which was created by the core developers behind the memcached project, and found it solved all the company’s caching problems. Better yet, Membase Server shares memcached’s on-the-wire protocol, so it plugged easily into The Knot’s existing implementation.
• With Membase, The Knot finally had a simple, fast, elastic key value caching solution, optimized for low-latency, high-volume data access by web applications:
  • Fast—The use of high-availability replication and distributed nodes means Membase Server provided The Knot with superior speed and system stability.
  • Simple—The Knot’s team had Membase Server installed in 20 minutes. It was Windows compatible, so The Knot was able to leverage their .NET expertise. Additionally, a rich set of centralized and automated GUI and programmatic tools eases the pain of managing and monitoring the cache.
  • Elastic—Membase Server has the ability to run on multiple physical nodes and balance keys across those nodes. Each bucket can be provisioned by port to allow different teams a pre-determined amount of space. This enables The Knot to properly provision resources and to add more resources without impacting performance.

The Knot implemented Membase Server on six bare metal cache boxes in a 5+1 installation with up to 1TB of RAM. The set-up provides fast, fault-tolerant access to READ data from within The Knot’s app server environments.

Supporting Quotes

• Jason Sirota, director of application architecture, The Knot Inc.: “Getting Membase Server installed and operational couldn’t have been easier, as it required no change to our running applications. Couchbase has an extremely responsive and knowledgeable technical team and we look forward to our continued relationship as we implement indexed search and storage solutions in the near future.”
• Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase: “We’re thrilled that The Knot Inc. is using Membase Server for its reliable in-memory caching capabilities and managing hundreds of millions of data requests a month without downtime. Like hundreds of others, The Knot is discovering the benefits of Membase Server’s simplicity, speed, and elasticity for driving scalability and performance needed for ‘big user’ environments.”  

Additional Online Resources:

• Read more on The Knot’s Membase deployment
• Download Membase Server
• Download the technical white paper
• Read the Couchbase blog
• Follow @couchbase on Twitter

Mountain View, Calif. – May 10, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created via the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced the inaugural CouchConf developer conference, which will take place Friday, July 29 at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco, with O’Reilly Media as the charter sponsor for the event. Registration for the event is now open.

“This one-day event is for any developer who wants to take a deeper dive into Couch technology, learn where it’s headed and build really cool stuff. We invite all developers to join us for a day in San Francisco to find out what’s new with Couch and learn more about harnessing this powerful technology for web and mobile applications,” said Damien Katz, Couchbase CTO and creator of Apache CouchDB. “We also want to thank O’Reilly Media for being our charter sponsor at this inaugural CouchConf event.”

Conference Highlights Include:

• Technology announcements and look ahead. Damien Katz and other Couchbase technologists will share the latest developments in Couch technology, with updates on the integration of Membase and CouchDB.
• Technically rich agenda. The day is packed with core and advanced breakouts tailored for both new and experienced users developing and deploying Couch-based applications. Sessions cover CouchDB, Membase Server, Mobile Couchbase, and related technologies.
• Pre-Conference Training. Two-day hands-on training is available in San Francisco just prior to the conference (July 27-28); training students attend CouchConf free of charge.
• The Couchbase Lounge. Throughout the conference, a designated area will be available for attendees to get hands-on support, network with one another, and hack together.
• Couch Developer Awards. Recognizing innovative use of Couch technology, the first-ever Couch Developer Awards will be announced at the closing session of the conference. Project nominations are underway now through July 15, 2011.
• Early bird pricing is now available. CouchConf San Francisco registration is now open with early bird pricing in effect until June 17, 2011.

Additional Online Resources

• Register for CouchConf San Francisco
• Nominate a project for the Couch Developer Awards
• Sponsor CouchConf San Francisco
• Register for pre-conference training: CouchDB Developer Training or Membase Server Ops Training
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter

Boston, Mass. – Summit 2011 – May 4, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created by the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced it is partnering with Red Hat to deliver Couchbase’s simple, fast, elastic database technology on OpenShift, Red Hat’s newly announced PaaS offering.

Couchbase is a high-performance, elastic, key-value (NoSQL) database with built-in memcached caching technology. Organizations including Zynga, AOL, the BBC and thousands of others power their interactive web applications with Couchbase. Because Couchbase supports the memcached network protocol, mature and easy-to-use drivers are available for practically every programming language and application framework including PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, C# and many others.

Couchbase’s distributed database architecture is a natural fit for applications developed and deployed on the OpenShift platform. Cloud-deployed applications, particularly interactive web applications, require a data layer that is elastic, fault-tolerant and continuously available. Couchbase’s no-downtime, production-proven database technology is currently in use behind thousands of systems running in leading IaaS and PaaS environments.

“With the OpenShift platform, Red Hat has created a uniquely attractive PaaS offering that pairs open source choice with a simple, unified framework. CouchDB and memcached are two of the most prevalent open source technologies on the web, and Couchbase is excited to offer them in Couchbase OpenShift cartridges, joining other best-of-breed open source technologies.” – James Phillips, Co-founder, Couchbase

“Red Hat is pleased to welcome Couchbase to our OpenShift ecosystem,” said Sarangan Rangachari, senior director, Cloud Ecosystem at Red Hat.  “With the addition of Couchbase technology to OpenShift, we’re able to offer added choice for OpenShift users from day one.”

Additional Online Resources

• More information on OpenShift
• Download Couchbase
• Couchbase product family overview
• Read Couchbase blog
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter

Mountain View, Calif. – April 20, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced it has been recognized as a “Cool Vendor” in the April 2011 “ Cool Vendors in Infrastructure Management, 2011” report by Donald Feinberg and Eric Knipp of Gartner, Inc.

Couchbase products represent the most comprehensive family of NoSQL database solutions for building scalable web and mobile applications. Built on Apache CouchDB, Membase, and Memcached open source software, Couchbase products are used in production by hundreds of companies including AOL, ShareThis and Zynga. In addition, CouchDB, created by Couchbase CTO Damien Katz, is deployed across 10 million desktops worldwide, including at organizations such as Apple, the BBC, Canonical and Mozilla.

“We’re honored to be recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in the 2011 Infrastructure Management space,” said Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase. “The rise of NoSQL database technology reflects the dramatic shift in how applications are architected for today’s interactive web and mobile applications. As the only end-to-end NoSQL solution provider with technology that scales from big data center clusters down to smartphones, Couchbase is well positioned to be the leader in this emerging and important market.”

Additional Online Resources

• Download the “Why NoSQL?” whitepaper
• Couchbase product family overview
• Read the Couchbase blog
• Follow @couchbase on Twitter

About Gartner’s Cool Vendor Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

Mountain View, Calif. – April 19, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced that Sweden-based AdAction, makers of a powerful platform for web-based advertising campaigns, has accelerated its data processing speed by 10x  using Membase Server. The migration from Apache Cassandra enabled AdAction to consistently exceed customer service-level agreements (SLAs) for performance and uptime, while at the same time reducing administrative overhead, particularly as their volume of business grows.

News Highlights

• Since 2002 AdAction has optimized the internet marketing for companies such as American Express, Scandinavian Airlines, Volkswagen, Universal Pictures and Travelocity, among others, in Europe’s Nordic region. AdAction’s core product provides ad serving solutions for its customers. The company stores massive amounts of consumer data (from 75 million consumers each month) that needs to be accessed and analyzed, and ultimately serve up highly targeted online ads—all in real time. Moreover, AdAction’s business model is “pay for performance” – the company earns revenue when their customers’ ads convert to sales. To maximize revenues, AdAction must present consumers with highly targeted ads every time.
• AdAction tried several NoSQL data management systems to store and retrieve the profile data use by its ad serving system. The most recent contender was Cassandra, which AdAction deployed with hopes of not only supporting their latency goals, but also enabling automatic expansion of cluster as user and data volumes increased. Initial implementations, however, proved to be sluggish in performance, cumbersome to rebalance and required significant downtime for upkeep and expansion.
• Looking for a better alternative, AdAction found Membase Server, which met all the requirements of their ad serving system:
  • Simple: AdAction was able to migrate to Membase Server quickly and easily in phases over just two weeks.
  • Fast: Designed for extreme low latency, Membase Server retrieves user profile data 10 times faster than Cassandra, giving AdAction substantially more headroom to process the profile data and serve up a highly targeted ad in the time allotted.
  • Elastic: Every new client that AdAction signs on brings thousands of new users and an upsurge in data volume—sometimes by as much as 10% overnight. But with Membase Server, the AdAction team can now add new cluster nodes with just a few clicks and have them up and running instantly, with no downtime, no impact on performance, and no administrative hassle.

Supporting Quotes

“We needed a system that is simple to use and manage, provides low latency and high throughput, and expands to support our business at any scale. Our future success is tied to our ability to deploy new nodes seamlessly, on demand, with no downtime or time-consuming manual re-balancing. The new infrastructure enables us to deliver on our promise – highly targeted ads served within 100 milliseconds 99.99% of the time. As a result, we are delivering a consistently excellent service for our clients and their end customers.”
– Wouter de Bie, systems developer for AdAction

“When it comes to serving ads, time is money, so AdAction requires the highest availability and lowest latency to meet our obligations. Membase Server provides fast and reliable performance for our millions of users. We no longer have to worry about working odd hours to restart cluster nodes and we can easily scale operations when traffic increases dramatically overnight.”
– Johan Stille, system developer, AdAction

“For many websites, the ability to monetize web traffic through ad and offer targeting is critical. Membase Server is gaining a lot of momentum with online advertisers for our ability to reliably retrieve operational data in substantially less time than other NoSQL alternatives, giving companies like AdAction much more processing time to accurately and effectively target ads that drive results – both for them, and their customers.”
– Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase

Mountain View, Calif. – April 4, 2011 – Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, today announced it has released Membase Server for Mac OS X. Part of the Couchbase family of NoSQL database products, Membase Server, designed and optimized for the data management needs of interactive web applications, now provides a developer-friendly interface to better serve Mac-centric, web-focused developers.

News Highlights

• Membase Server for Mac OS X, a community edition released today, provides developer-friendly features that integrate seamlessly and take full advantage of the operating system, making it even easier for Mac users to develop scalable web applications against Membase Server.
   
• Applications built with Membase Server for Mac OS X can be seamlessly deployed on the production platform of choice; Membase Server currently supports Windows as well as Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux.
   
• Membase open source technology provides a distributed key-value database with integrated memcached caching technology, enabling dynamic cluster elasticity and sustained low-latency, high-throughput data operations. Its core technology powers 18 of the top 20 largest websites; and few web applications now enter production without it. Organizations such as Zynga and ShareThis use Membase to dramatically lower data management costs while improving the scalability and performance of their demanding interactive web applications.

Supporting Quotes

“Membase Server for Mac OS X is easy as one-two-free. You download it. You run it. There’s no installation and it behaves exactly the way a Mac developer would expect.”
– Dustin Sallings, Couchbase chief architect and the primary guy behind the Mac OS X release

“Couchbase continues to invest in making things easier for developers to build scalable, high-throughput web applications. Together with today’s release of Membase Server for Mac OS X, we have also refreshed Couchbase Server for Mac OS X (our distribution of Apache CouchDB), providing the same level of OS integration and user-friendly look and feel. We look forward to continuing to provide the community with products that work the way developers do.”
– Frank Weigel, Couchbase director of product management

“We’ve been compiling source to run Membase on Mac OS X, but compiling is less-than-convenient and in the end the software didn’t look and feel like a native Mac application. It’s awesome to have a packaged Membase binary that does all that right out of the box, saving us time and making Membase Server an even better NoSQL database choice for developers.”
– Jon Prall, VP of Ops, Tango

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – (March 14, 2011)– Couchbase, the NoSQL database company created by the merger of CouchOne and Membase, today introduced a board of advisors stacked with industry executives, Internet pioneers and database technology luminaries that will play a significant role in shaping the company’s strategy and technical direction.

Members of Couchbase’s advisory board include:

• Frank Artale, has spent three decades building, investing in and advising software companies. Currently a general partner at Ignition Partners, Frank previously held senior executive roles at Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS Software, Consera Software (where he was founder and CEO) and Microsoft where he spent nine years in roles including GM of the Windows 2000 group.

• Josh Berkus is primarily known as one of the core team members of the open source database project PostgreSQL and has also worked with many other relational and non-relational database systems. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts and heavily involved in many open source communities, including CouchDB – primarily because of his interest in government open data.

• Roy Fielding is a pioneer of the World Wide Web, open source, and software architecture. He wrote the standards for HTTP and URI, defined a bit of HTML, and was among the first elected members of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. Roy is also a founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, incorporator and first chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, and a current member of the ASF board of directors.

• Richard Hipp is the architect and primary author of SQLite, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is believed to be the most widely deployed SQL database, embedded in software systems including Mozilla Firefox, Apple iOS and MacOS, Skype, PHP, Symbian, Solaris 10, McAfee anti-virus software, and countless others.

• Robert Johnson is director of infrastructure software engineering at Facebook, where he leads software development efforts to cost-effectively scale Facebook’s infrastructure and optimize performance for its over 500 million active users. During his time with the company, the number of users has expanded more than seventy-fold and Facebook now handles billions of page views a day.

• Alan Kasindorf runs memcached.org, having played a major role in the project since 2007. He has helped build numerous large websites with open source software. He is also advocate and contributor for MogileFS, Perlbal, Gearman, and others.

• Cadir Lee, Chief Technology Officer, Zynga, oversees the development and innovation of Zynga’s technology platform and large-scale infrastructures. Cadir played a pivotal role in Zynga’s founding sponsorship of the Membase open source project.

• Michael Lopp is a veteran Silicon Valley engineering manager and a well-known blogger and author. Michael writes at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose, which has led to the publication of two books: Managing Humans and Being Geek.

• Matt Ocko has over 25 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur, operating executive, and venture capitalist, during which he has actively helped create over $10 billion in fully realized shareholder value. His current and prior investments include Zynga, Facebook, XenSource, Fortinet and Verisign. He is currently a partner at Sevin Rosen.

• Michael Olson is CEO of Cloudera, the company delivering an enterprise-grade data management platform built on Apache Hadoop. He was formerly CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, the open source embedded database engine and has played key business roles at database vendors Oracle, Britton Lee, Illustra Information Technologies and Informix Software.

• In Sik Rhee is an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor across a broad spectrum of technology-enabled markets. In Sik co-founded two successful venture-backed companies: Opsware, acquired Hewlett Packard for US$1.6 billion in 2007; and Kiva Software Corporation, acquired by Netscape Communications in 1997 for $180 million. He is a general partner with Rembrandt Venture Partners.

• Steve Souders, leads web performance and open source initiatives for Google. He has authored two books: High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with over two million downloads. He also created Cuzillion, SpriteMe, and Browserscope.

• Chris Wensel, CTO/Founder, Concurrent, Inc. is the author of the Cascading data processing open-source project. He also co-founded Scale Unlimited, the first Hadoop and “Big Data” related professional services and training company.

Supporting Quotes

“The recent merger of CouchOne and Membase brought together not just a dream team of engineers, but also a veritable ‘who’s who’ of industry leaders on our Couchbase advisory board. We are honored to have these distinguished individuals on our extended team, helping us accelerate our ability to deliver on the power and promise of NoSQL database solutions. Ultimately, our customers and users will benefit from the concentration of data management expertise and industry experience we gain through our Couchbase advisors.”
– Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO

Mountain View and Oakland, Calif. – February 8, 2011 – Membase and CouchOne today announced they have joined forces to create Couchbase, the first and only provider of a comprehensive, end-to-end family of NoSQL database products. The merger yields an unmatched lineup of data management capabilities built with Apache CouchDB document database technology, memcached distributed caching technology and the Membase data flow and cluster management system. The new Couchbase product family, also introduced today, combines these capabilities creating solutions that scale from large clusters down to mobile phones and tablets.

News Highlights

• CouchOne, founded by CouchDB creator Damien Katz, provides database solutions powered by the Apache CouchDB database project. Known for its ease of use and reliability, CouchDB is the most widely deployed open source document database. As an open source project, it enjoys a vibrant development community and more than 10 million desktop deployments worldwide, as well as large-scale implementations at the BBC, Apple, and CERN.
• Membase, the company behind Membase open source technology, provides a distributed key-value database with integrated memcached caching technology. Membase enables dynamic cluster elasticity and sustained low-latency, high-throughput data operations. Its core technology powers 18 of the top 20 largest websites; and few web applications now enter production without it. Organizations including Zynga, AOL and ShareThis use Membase to dramatically lower data management costs while improving the scalability and performance of their demanding interactive web applications.
• With the merger of CouchOne and Membase, and the resulting combination of CouchDB, memcached and Membase technologies, Couchbase becomes the safest and most durable document database, with a recovery-oriented architecture that offers unprecedented reliability and availability for data, whether stored on a single server or spread across hundreds. Couchbase technologies represent the most comprehensive data management solution for building scalable web and mobile applications, with indexing, flexible querying and ease of use that developers love; and elastic clustering, robust storage management and consistently high performance relied on by system administrators and operators.
• The Couchbase product family, scheduled for release over the coming months, includes offerings optimized for the data center, desktop and mobile device. In addition to a consistent developer API across products, the Couchbase family will feature automatic end-to-end synchronization – supporting cross-datacenter replication and mobile-to-cloud database synchronization. The Couchbase family will include:
  • Elastic Couchbase [Membase Server]: Membase Server, to be renamed Elastic Couchbase in a forthcoming release, will combine Membase, memcached and CouchDB technology to provide high-performance caching, elastic clustering and document database features. It can effortlessly scale from a single server to a hundred-node cluster supporting an application with millions of concurrent users.
  • Couchbase Single Server: A lightweight, non-clustered Couchbase edition appropriate for developers and smaller Couchbase production deployments.
  • Mobile Couchbase: Initially focused on the iOS platform, Mobile Couchbase is a database embeddable into native iOS applications. Mobile Couchbase provides data management services to applications whether offline or on, and can be configured to automatically synchronize with other Couchbase instances when network connectivity is established.
  • Hosted Couchbase: Hosted Couchbase is a quick and easy way to get started with Couchbase, and provides a ready-made cloud sync point for applications built using Mobile Couchbase.
• Membase CEO Bob Wiederhold, becomes CEO of the combined company, with CouchOne CEO Damien Katz serving as Couchbase CTO. Couchbase headquarters is in Mountain View, Calif., with sales and development offices worldwide. The merged company will serve the mission-critical demands of developers and operations teams with proven, production-ready software backed by world-class support and services.

Supporting Quotes

“The merger of CouchOne and Membase creates a new powerhouse in NoSQL database technology. The union of our technologies is extremely exciting because it amplifies our respective strengths and fills our gaps. Further, the combined technical team, which will be led by Damien Katz, is nothing short of a NoSQL dream team, and positions us to more rapidly innovate, harden, and deliver high-quality data management solutions that will accelerate our customers’ success.”
— Bob Wiederhold, CEO, Membase

“To me, the most exciting thing about the Couchbase merger is that we are able to more quickly give users of both technologies the features they’ve been clamoring for. CouchDB users will acquire the high performance, high scale, simple-fast-elastic capabilities of Membase, while Membase users will acquire CouchDB’s indexing features (map/reduce view, Lucene, R-Tree GeoCouch), replication, reliability and a clear path to mobile integration. This is clearly a win-win-win for us and for our customers and users.”
— Damien Katz, co-founder and CEO of CouchOne and creator of CouchDB

“I’ve long held that the consolidation of NoSQL vendors was just a matter of time. I’m not surprised that the emerging winner in this process is Membase. We evaluated the gamut of NoSQL database offerings before ultimately selecting Membase at Zynga, but CouchDB was also a finalist. At that point we wished we could have combined the best of these systems, and that is exactly what is going to happen now. We’re delighted with this merger.”
— Cadir Lee, CTO, Zynga

“Membase and CouchOne were already two of the leading NoSQL database providers, and the combination of Membase’s high performance clustering and caching technology with CouchDB’s document data model appears to be a good fit. The two companies are also complementary in terms of their approach to developers and operational adoption, and Couchbase should be able to hit the ground running with their combined technologies, teams and development plans.”
— Matt Aslett, Senior Analyst, The 451 Group

“If you can live without joins, document data models make a lot of sense. For most of human history, the principal models for storing information have been document-oriented; today, many developers think in terms of objects, documents, or both. The Couchbase plan for a document-model DBMS is very interesting, especially in the variety of its scaling and replication capabilities.”
— Curt Monash, President of Monash Research and Editor of DBMS 2

“It has been a pleasure working with the team at Membase, both in my role as company advisor and in engagements between Cloudera and Membase. Bringing CouchOne and Membase together is a combination of technologies and companies that just makes sense. I definitely support this move and I’m looking forward to working closely with the combined team.”
— Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera

“Modern cloud applications require a robust and elastic database solution. The elasticity of Membase married to the robust document data model of CouchDB is a perfect match for these applications. The Couchbase merger strengthens our relationship with the company and enhances the value of the solutions we provide to our shared customers.”
— Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems

“We have a multi-faceted relationship with CouchOne – both using and distributing their CouchDB technologies through our popular personal cloud service Ubuntu One. The merger of CouchOne and Membase creates a stronger business partner with increased market presence and capacity for accelerated innovation. We applaud the combination and look forward to working with Couchbase.”
— Cristian Parrino, Director of Online Services, Canonical

More customer and partner quotes here