In a bid to make its in-memory NoSQL database an industry standard, Aerospike said it will release the Community Edition of its database server and developer toolkit under open source licenses.

The company’s Enterprise Edition, which includes features like production-ready binaries, hot patches and 24×7 enterprise support, remains under commercial license, but is available for a free trial period.

Aerospike is a flash-optimized in-memory database that the company claims delivers superior speed, scalability and reliability. It is typically used between a Web application and a Hadoop cluster to  capture and organize large amounts of information for analysis.

Founder Srini Sirnivasan said demand for such capabilities  is increasing as companies seek to deliver personalized customer interactions over a variety of devices. The Aerospike About Us page calls out Ad-tech and omni-channel Marketing platforms as examples of customers in these markets.

The decision to open source the database software comes at a time when NoSQL is predicted to 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,” according to Dwight Merriman, CEO and founder of 10gen, in a 2013 SiliconANGLE article.

The Aerospike client software development kit (SDK) will be licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and the Aerospike database server is licensed under the copyleft Affero General Public License (APGL).

SiliconANGLE analyst and theCUBE co-host Jeff Kelly thinks Aerospike’s gamble will pay off.  “This is a smart move by Aerospike, which already has good traction in the ad-tech space,” he said. “By open sourcing its eponymous database, Aerospike has significantly lowered the barriers to adoption, which will help it expand into more verticals and use cases. Aerospike is betting that new users, once they try the database, will find it to be the highest performing NoSQL database for real-time operational analytics and quickly move to paid subscriptions.”

Aerospike also hopes that open sourcing Community Edition and free trial Enterprise Edition will whet prospective customers’ appetites for its commercially licensed software.

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