Q & A with James Phillips and Damien Katz of Couchbase

Last week CouchOne and Membase announced their merger to form Couchbase. Both James Phillips and Damien Katz were kind enough to take some of their time to answer some questions about the merger.

NoSQL DB: How did the merger come about, what was the catalyst?

CB: In early December, Damien and I were introduced to each other by one of our investors – Robin Vasan at Mayfield Fund. In talking about our plans for the future, it became increasingly clear that the R&D investments we would each be making in 2011-2012 were in technology areas in which the other had already invested heavily. On the Membase side, we’d build a high-performance in-memory caching, data flow management and clustering system. On the CouchOne side, they had built a high-performance, full-featured document database with an incorruptible storage layer. Combining these solutions – Membase in front of CouchOne – we eliminate 12-18 months each in engineering investment. And we build a team double the size that can focus on innovating forward, versus duplicating the efforts of each other.

NoSQL DB: What type of feedback are you getting about the merger?

CB: The feedback on both sides has been overwhelmingly positive. The practical result of this merger is the acceleration of features and functionality for both Membase and CouchOne. And we aren’t going to break the things our users already love about the offerings. Because there was effectively no overlap in our technologies this is truly an additive merger. There is very little to not like, if you are a user of either system.

NoSQL DB: What's going to happen to the open source projects?

CB: They will continue as before. We are committed to supporting, contributing to and enhancing CouchDB, Memcached and Membase which are the core ingredient technologies inside our products. Our team represents the largest volume of code contribution and core committers to each of these products.

NoSQL DB: Timeframe for the first release of the integrated product?

CB: We plan to ship our first “integrated” release by Summer. But users don’t have to wait to get value from each technology. Many users already deploy Membase and CouchDB side-by-side in production. Doing so today puts users in a position to consolidate around Couchbase going forward, without disruption.

NoSQL DB: Most exciting technical aspect of the merger?

CB: Looking beyond the obvious (indexing and query for membase users, high-performance caching and clustering for CouchDB users) probably the most  “exciting” technical aspect of this merger is mobile-cloud synchronization support. Membase (later to be renamed “Elastic Couchbase”) is ideal for deployment in the cloud behind, for example, a very large-scale web application. It is easy to get started with, but can just as easily scale to support millions of concurrent users. Most of those users today also have mobile devices – phones and tablets. Native applications (iPhone applications from the Apple App Store, for example) are the primary model for software consumption on these devices, and the most successful web applications now have iPhone and Android applications. Synchronizing the data between the mobile version (frequently used while “offline”) and the web version of the application is hard. By using Couchbase technology underneath the native application on mobile devices, with Membase in the data center, the sync problem is eliminated. CouchSync technology can effortlessly keep millions of mobile devices synchronized with the cloud database – whether for backup/disaster recovery needs, or to ensure consistent data regardless of web or native mobile interfaces to that data.

NoSQL DB: With this merger, where does this place Couchbase amongst the other NoSQL providers?

CB: We believe the combination of our technologies – whether deployed alongside each other, or later in fully integrated form – places us far ahead of other NoSQL providers for the use cases we target. Specifically if you are building a web application that requires low-latency access to data, where cost-effective scalability is a requirement, then Membase and CouchOne technologies offer what we believe to be the most attractive alternative. And if you are in need of mobile-to-cloud synchronization, there really is no good alternative.

Thank you to both James and Damien for taking the time to answer our questions.