Couchbase, Inc., the cloud database platform company, is announcing the official launch of Capella Columnar on AWS, bringing real-time operational and analytic workload enablement to AWS. Additionally, Couchbase is also debuting Couchbase Mobile with vector search, as well as Capella Free Tier, expanding the way Couchbase serves developers while reducing costs and simplifying operations.
“We're committed to empowering organizations to build truly adaptive applications that can respond to real-world scenarios in real time,” said Matt McDonough, SVP of product and partners at Couchbase. “With the launch of Capella Columnar, we're solving long-standing challenges in JSON data analytics, enabling businesses to seamlessly integrate insights into their operational applications. Our vector search capabilities in Couchbase Mobile extend this adaptivity to edge and IoT devices, opening up new possibilities for hyper-personalized and context-aware applications.”
Capella Columnar unifies key-value and columnar storage options for operational and analytic workloads within a single platform, enabling developers to leverage the flexibility of JSON without relegating semi-structured JSON data to dormancy due to the rigidness of traditional analytic systems. Capella Columnar parses, transforms, and persists JSON data into an analysis-ready format, supporting real-time, multisource data ingestion from not just Couchbase but also third-party JSON or SQL systems via Confluent Cloud.
Notably, Capella Columnar works to reduce the latency, complexity, and cost of building real-time, adaptive applications—which is particularly relevant in the era of AI applications and their intense demands, according to Couchbase.
“Couchbase already provides a highly flexible data management capability by blending its base JSON document model with the ability to manage the data in a networked way,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC. “Now they have added blended analytic-transaction processing support that leverages the performance advantage of columnar data management together with vector search in support of applications demanding intelligent data access at the speed of business. These are capabilities that the market has been looking for but are hard to find contained in a single product.”
Couchbase Mobile’s newfound support for vector search empowers mobile developers to implement vector search at the edge, creating fast, secure, and reliable semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications—which work even without internet connection. This affirms Couchbase as a leader in enabling offline-first edge AI applications for customers, according to the company.
With Capella Free Tier, developers benefit from a free environment to assess and explore products, as well as test new features, without any time constraints. Allowing developers to learn Capella at a pace comfortable to them, Capella Free Tier also offers access to a myriad of community-supported extensions, including cbshell 1.0 and Ionic Capacitor for Couchbase Lite.
“Developers want to kick the tires on any software they plan to use before committing, particularly when it comes to database solutions,” said Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. “By offering a free tier to Capella, Couchbase acknowledges the tinkering spirit that motivates these important builders and creators.”
To learn more about Couchbase’s latest updates, please visit https://www.couchbase.com/.