Every week the Opus team picks a news story or topic or idea that is relevant to the entrepreneurs and businesses we partner with.

RSS Feed

Archives

New developments in the NoSQL world

Ajit Deshpande - - 0 Comments

Last week, the NoSQL database space saw a couple of interesting new announcements: First, Couchbase announced a new, mobile-focused database called Couchbase Lite. With Couchbase Lite, app developers can natively use the database on the mobile device to enhance user experience as well as to enable more comprehensive syncing of app-states across mobile devices (a la Dropstore API). Second, Amazon announced a local version of its own DynamoDB database, which can be used for offline development of applications before the developer goes live on AWS. Couchbase and DynamoDB are both key-value store databases that offer low latency/high throughput, but with limited feature-sets around understanding the underlying data itself (Couchbase 2.0 does get closer to being a document store).

As compute power in mobile devices continues to grow, it makes sense to have more and more data around the app reside on the mobile device. In that context, a key-value store such as Couchbase Lite might have the best shot of all the NoSQL flavors to find immediate use cases in mobile – other flavors such as column stores and document stores, being more feature rich and with higher latency, may find it harder to make headway in the near term. Couchbase Lite should thus help the company improve its competitive position in the NoSQL market that currently sees MongoDB as the leader.

As for DynamoDB’s local version, while the stated objective is to simplify app development and deployment, the bigger goal is probably for Amazon to use DynamoDB to get a foothold in the private or hybrid cloud and/or to move beyond IaaS and into PaaS. Either ways, this should help DynamoDB get increased adoption within the developer community and further muddy the NoSQL landscape

Last week’s announcements suggest that whether it’s content consumption or app development, compute might be moving back just a little bit from the cloud to the edge device. This means that NoSQL vendors might need to deal with increased diversification in end-points and environments going forward, all while the vendors continue to jostle for market share. Maybe this diversification will be the impetus for consolidation or shake-out in this fragmented space.

« Back to Blog
Also on the Opus Blog

VMware / Nicira and the Software Defined Data Center

July 29, 2012
Ajit Deshpande - Last week, VMware announced that it was acquiring early Software Defined Networking leader Nicira for a deal worth ~$1.26 billion. Nicira is a trend-setter in Sotware Defined...

ARM: The new standard?

October 31, 2012
Ajit Deshpande - On October 25th, ARM, Red Hat and Applied Micro announced a partnership to develop a disruptive 64-bit server platform for datacenters and enterprises. This announcement came on...

Waze of the Start-up Nation!

June 18, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - GPS-based navigation app startup Waze was acquired last week by Google for a price just north of $1 billion. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Israel, Waze had previously raised...

Linksys is Cisco's no more

January 28, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Linksys, which was Cisco’s first acquisition in the consumer networking segment, was sold to home automation products manufacturer Belkin for an undisclosed amount last week....