There’s more news on the NoSQL front, with industry leader Couchbase pulling in a healthy $60 million of Silicon Valley cash as it bids to muscle in on the territory of legacy giants like Oracle and IBM.

The funding round, which was led by WestSummit and Accel Growth Fund, is a big bet by venture capitalists on the potential for new database technologies to steal business away from database incumbents.

Couchbase’s JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document-based database tech is known for its high performance, scalability and ease of maintenance. Like rivals Aerospike, MongoDB and Datastax, it aims to use NoSQL technologies to entice both developers and enterprises. NoSQL databases are based upon a simplified design that makes them well-suited to high-volume, distributed applications.

Wikibon earlier this year forecast the NoSQL market to be worth $1.825 billion by 2017. And while the tech is still in its infancy, NoSQL is now used by 16 percent of 500 enterprises surveyed by Tesora. Meanwhile, Dwight Merriman, CEO and founder of 10gen, wrote last year that NoSQL will become “the preferred database technology for the vast majority of use cases, with document databases increasingly capable of handling as much as 80 percent of database workloads.” With relational DBMS leader Oracle struggling to grow new license revenues of late, some people think the market is ready for disruption.

So what are Couchbase’s chances of becoming a major player in NoSQL? Wikibon ranks the company sixth overall in market revenue, and its popularity with mobile developers is distinctive. The company offers a stripped-down server in a 500KB ‘Couchbase Lite’ configuration that enables developers to build apps using the same database on both mobile devices and in the cloud. These can then be linked using Couchbase’s Sync service.

“We’re providing a mobile database that allows you to run your applications whether you have an internet connection or not,” said Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold in an interview with ZDNet.

Couchbase’s rivals aren’t standing still. Just this week, Aerospike took the bold move of open-sourcing its own NoSQL database to entice more developers to use its tech, while MongoDB has made deals with giants like Google and Microsoft. And you can’t write off Oracle, which has at last begun adding new technologies to its database products to challenge the upstarts.

photo credit: Tiago Daniel via photopin cc