Couchbase introduces Capella Columnar Service

Capella columnar is a new service that introduces a columnar store and data integration into the Capella Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), thereby allowing for real-time data analysis on the same platform as operational workloads. By converging operational and real-time analytic applications into one database platform, Couchbase removes friction to deliver a premium customer experience. For more information about Capella columnar and to sign up for the private preview, please visit https://www.couchbase.com/products/analytics/.

“To gain a competitive advantage and accelerate business opportunities, organizations are investing in real-time, adaptive applications that are contextual, hyper-personalized and intelligent. Real-time analytics are paramount to delivering these adaptive applications, and AI is making them even better and more strategic,” said Scott Anderson, SVP of product management and business operations at Couchbase. “With columnar in our Capella DBaaS, for the first time organizations can easily build adaptive applications powered by real-time analytics in a single JSON-based platform. We are eliminating the latency gap that has forever existed between analytics and operational databases while making it easier for development teams to include the required real-time analytic measures into their adaptive applications.”

According to Forrester Research1, "Moving data from transactional systems to operational systems and then to analytical systems is a barrier to making better decisions faster. Disparate data stacks also compromise the delivery of timely data to various applications, operational systems and into the analytics workflow, resulting in missed business opportunities." The acceleration of AI creates an even greater challenge because having disparate database platforms introduces complexity that confuses the models being trained to power the application. Capella columnar solves these problems as it allows users to perform operational and real-time analytical processing with compelling performance and speed, all in one uniquely architected platform. Furthermore, both the application and the user benefit by experiencing no latency and receiving a more seamless, premium experience.

With the new Capella columnar service, customers can:

● Improve agility and performance. Capella columnar works within a Capella-powered application to enable fast, schemaless ingestion without having to perform extract, transform and load (ETL). The service can distribute data from operational workloads to perform real-time analytics on operational data and then immediately influence application behavior with that information. In addition, the separation of compute and storage means Capella columnar can rapidly scale to meet changing application or analytical needs.

● Stream ingestion from enterprise data sources in real time. With Capella columnar, operational analytics are not limited to only operational data because users can include external JSON, relational, streaming and other datasets from SaaS applications or other database management sources. Capella columnar can analyze a true variety of data in a simple, single statement. For example, it can analyze data from Couchbase, S3, BSON, Cassandra, DynamoDB and MySQL all in the same statement.

● Increase ease of use for developers. Capella columnar uses the same SQL++ query language across operational and real-time analytic applications. This means that developers who already know SQL can easily build applications on a single platform with a single query language instead of having to use two different query languages. The new service also features natural language-powered Capella iQ as a SQL++ co-pilot for faster coding.

● Reduce complexity and cost. By converging operational and real-time analytics in one data platform, customers can achieve more with Capella and with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) instead of absorbing the cost of one database platform for operational workloads and another for near-real-time analytics. In addition, teams converting JSON data to traditional analytic databases will no longer need to go through a complex conversion process.

Capella columnar leverages AWS services as an integral part of the product architecture 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. In addition, Capella columnar will have connectors to move data from Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and others as well as to move data to Amazon SageMaker for training and modeling.

Couchbase is attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, November 27-December 1, 2023. Attendees can visit booth number 1095 to see a demo of Capella columnar and learn more about Capella for building adaptive applications.