infoTECH Feature

April 01, 2014

Couchbase's International Expansion Sign of Popularity of NoSQL Databases

Couchbase announced Monday that it had opened additional offices across the globe. In addition to its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, the company will have offices in Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Bangalore and Tel Aviv. Although global expansion is always an important event in a company’s growth, the expansion signifies something even greater: the NoSQL database movement is growing so rapidly, vendors like Couchbase struggle to keep up with it.

The NoSQL movement approaches juggernaut-like status because of several factors. Enterprises demand all sorts of data, not just highly structured data that you can enter into a form on a web page. These organizations need data that can come in all sorts of formats: audio, sound, graphics, documents and web pages to name a few. This kind of data does not fit well into the rigid character string, date and numeric data types that relational databases require.

The data that companies capture needs to be more flexible than it was in the past. Relational databases, by their nature, require rules that enforce relational integrity, and as a result, the workflow is a bit counterintuitive. You could not enter employee data until branch office data was entered first. Adds, updates and deletes can affect multiple tables and making schema changes can also have considerable effects downstream. The relational model avoids redundant data, but it is not always easy to work with.

The philosophy with NoSQL databases is that a little redundant data is okay, since storage and hardware are cheaper. Creating data entities is not so unwieldy, because you don’t have to pour so much effort into a rigidly defined schema when you create databases and modify field definitions.

According to TechNavio, the NoSQL market will grow rapidly at a CAGR of 53 percent from 2013 to 2018. The IT world moves at such a rapid pace today that traditional development tools and methodologies cannot keep up. Companies are turning to more agile approaches and that process will include more deployment of NoSQL databases. 




Edited by Cassandra Tucker
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