Southbank Software has launched its first product, dbKoda. Founded in late 2016 by Guy Harrison, an Oracle ACE and MongoDB-certified DBA with more than 20 years of experience in database design, development, administration, and optimization, the company’s mission is to create tools to support the next generation of database developers.
dbKoda, Southbank’s first publicly available product is an open source database development and administration platform, initially available for MongoDB.
MongoDB was targeted at the outset because of its rapid growth and popularity among full stack developers, according to Harrison, who is director and CTO of Southbank. “The database landscape has a lot of interesting and legitimate players, but MongoDB is showing the strongest growth,” noted Harrison.
Although the MongoDB ecosystem is dynamic, overall NoSQL lacks the sort of serious strategic tools providers that helped the relational vendors become truly productive, Harrison added. “The database vendors themselves are focused on investing in the core platform and in their commercial enterprise features. Consequently, tooling for community versions and for database developers is often a lower priority. A vibrant third-party tools market fills that gaps and allows the database platform to reach its greatest potential for the entire community.”
Compared with other similar products, dbKoda has a more developer-centric approach, enhancing rather than discouraging editing and command line shells, explained Harrison. “It’s written in a modern JavaScript framework which allows it to provide a rich experience from any desktop platform or from within a web browser.” And, since open source databases like MongoDB demand open source tooling, dbKoda is licensed as AGPL, Harrison said.
Southbank is funded by Toba Capital, a VC firm founded by former Quest Software CEO Vinny Smith. Smith and Harrison, who is also a partner at Toba Capital, worked together at Quest developing a range of popular database tools and now plan to apply their expertise to modern database systems in the NoSQL, NewSQL, and big data markets.
For more information, go to www.dbkoda.com.