NoSQL continues to gain adoption, primarily due to the need for it in corporate daily operations and the freedom it provides compared to the rigid schemas associated with relational technologies.

That’s the big picture from Coucbbase, which today announced the results of a survey it did with 1,300 practitioners. Couchbase is one of the leading vendors in the NoSQL market so it’s not a big surprise to see them publish these rosy results. But the finding do speak to the overall transformation of the database market and the roaring plume of data that is shaping a new tech landscape.

I agree that NoSQL has moved beyond the experimentation phase.  In part, you can thank Oracle for that. The fact they jumped into the market has given customers more reason to invest more capital into the technology. It’s a validation point.

Here are some of the results from the survey:

• Nearly half of the more than 1,300 respondents indicated they have funded NoSQL projects in the first half of this year. In companies with more than 250 developers, nearly 70% will fund NoSQL projects over the course of 2012.
• 49% cited rigid schemas as the primary driver for their migration from relational to NoSQL database technology. Lack of scalability and high latency/low performance also ranked highly among the reasons given for migrating to NoSQL  (see chart below for more details).
• 40% overall say that NoSQL is very important or critical to their daily operations, with another 37% indicating it is becoming more important.

Couchbase asked how companies are using NoSQL Some interesting answers included that go beyond the traditional use cases:

• real-time tracking and segmentation of users for ad targeting
• disaster recovery
• inventory tracking
• manufacturing automation
• insurance underwriting
• multi-call center operations (with replication of production data)
• Twitter stream analysis

Respondents were  also asked about what they expect and hope for out of NoSQL in 2012. Couchbase breaks down what they say into four boxes: schemas; replacing RDMS/making it default database; scalability/performance and speed/agility in app development. Answers included:

• Gaining freedoms from inflexible schemas that do not adapt well to changing business requirements.
• Making NoSQL an integral part of daily operations and handle at least 30% of transaction load.
• Allowing the capability to share billions of documents across multiple commodity servers.
• Help in deploying new features faster without having to manage SQL patch scripts and migrations.

ServicesAngle

NoSQL – it fits with so much that we write about. It’s a huge factor in the transformation of the enterprise and a necessary focus for any services provider looking to provide a level of value added services.

Hat tip: Originally saw this news on Diversity, courtesy of Ben Kepes.