Couchbase, Inc., the cloud database platform company, is launching a new Capella columnar service on AWS, delivering columnar store and data integration to Capella Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) customers. The solution integrates operational and real-time analytic applications into a single platform to enable Capella users to create adaptive, contextual, hyper-personalized, and intelligent applications.
Migrating data from transactional systems to operational systems and then to analytical systems introduces major friction for application workflows, directly impacting end-user experiences. This is further compounded by the rapid proliferation of AI, where disparate data stacks threaten to inhibit data timeliness as well as model data comprehension.
The launch of Capella’s columnar service works to centralize operational and real-time analytical processing within a single JSON-based platform, eliminating latency and delivering a seamless user experience backed by high performance and speed, according to the company.
By providing fast, schemaless ingestion without needing to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, Capella columnar distributes data from operational workloads to perform real-time analytics on that operational data. Operational analytics can also ingest external JSON, relational, streaming, and other datasets from SaaS apps or other sources in real time.
Once ingested, the response from the application is immediate, additionally benefiting from accelerating scaling through the separation of storage and compute.
“Having a single platform versus a number of disparate platforms…allows us to…move that data [from the Couchbase operational data store] into analytics and not batching data on a weekly, monthly, or even daily basis,” said Scott Anderson, SVP of product management and business operations at Couchbase. “[It provides] the ability to move those mutations that happen in our operational data store and propagate them into Capella columnar rapidly because we do that from memory-to-memory replication. So, what you're able to have is the real-time view of the data and see those changes that are occurring and have them moved into the columnar data store.”
Additionally, the centralization of operational and real-time analytics reduces TCO, allowing enterprises to achieve more with Capella instead of requiring more than one database, according to the company.
Aside from its performance, diverse data ingestion, and cost-saving capabilities, Capella columnar features the same SQL++ query language across operational and real-time analytical apps for increased developer ease-of-use. The introduction of Capella IQ, an AI cloud service as a SQL++ co-pilot, also eases usability by empowering developer productivity with natural language.
“What IQ allows people to do is interact with Capella using natural language processing [and] creating indexes, writing queries, and so forth,” said Anderson. “[IQ] will allow developers to speed their adoption, learning, and the ability to write code with Capella columnar. IQ is very important in improving developer productivity…[and] that's a capability that we want to continue to extend and make more broadly available as we move forward.”
The launch of Capella’s columnar service extensively integrates with the AWS ecosystem, leveraging various Amazon solutions, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), and AWS Secrets Manager.
Capella’s service also features connectors for migrating data from Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), in addition to connectors for data migration to Amazon SageMaker.
“We are continuing to innovate and extend the capabilities of Capella, our Database-as-a-Service, and this [Capella columnar] is just another proof point around our expansion and capabilities that we're adding within that platform,” concluded Anderson.
Capella columnar is currently in a private preview stage. To learn more about Couchbase columnar, please visit https://www.couchbase.com/.