Couchbase Inc. today released a new version of its popular mobile database that will enable developers to build apps with more sophisticated machine learning and privacy features.

Couchbase Lite, as the NoSQL store is called, exists in a highly competitive market. Realm Inc., the startup behind another leading mobile database, was recently acquired by publicly traded MongoDB Inc. for $39 million. There are also a number of open-source solutions out there along with cloud-based data management services such as Google LLC’s Firebase.

Today’s update aims to give Couchbase Lite an edge in the artificial intelligence department. The platform now enables developers to plug handset-optimized machine learning models, including Google’s MobileNets algorithms, into the database instance inside an app.

A productivity service could use the feature to provide AI-powered document management capabilities. A developer building a photo app, meanwhile, might incorporate a computer vision model to help users find familiar faces in photos.

Couchbase Lite also supports more powerful AI models that ingest data from multiple sources. The platform can analyze the information an app stores on the user’s device and automatically generate an index, a file that facilitates faster access to key records. This index enables machine learning algorithms to quickly correlate existing records with new data such as new photos from the user’s phone camera.

“Couchbase Lite can also build a prediction index, which effectively functions as a cache of the prediction results,” Priya Rajagopal, a principal product manager at Couchbase, wrote in a blog post. “By building a prediction index during write time, users can expect to see several orders of magnitude in the performance improvement for their inductive queries.”

Also new in today’s update is a set of features that allows Couchbase Lite to automatically delete records after a specified time period. The enhancements aim to make it easier to meet privacy regulations such as the European Union’s GDPR law, which limits how long organizations may hold onto certain types of user information.

The other new features rolling out for Couchbase Lite include an improved error monitoring tool and a bandwidth-saving mechanism called delta sync. The latter capability reduces the size of in-app content updates by removing the need to transmit duplicate information. An e-commerce company, for instance, could synchronize product price changes to its shopping app without having to send entire item descriptions each time.

Photo: Couchbase/Facebook