Artificial intelligence is operation-critical for today’s enterprises. Through innovations such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, the world has seen AI’s potential to reshape the tech landscape. The resulting scramble to harness it, wherever it is valuable, is intensifying.

Not missing out on the action, Couchbase Inc. just lifted the wraps off its Capella columnar service, a feature added to Capella that facilitates real-time data analysis on the same platform as operational workloads.

“We’ve launched what we’re calling the Capella Columnar Service, which is a new service to Capella, which is Couchbase’s database-as-a-service offering,” said Scott Anderson (pictured), senior vice president for product management and business operations at Couchbase. “It’s a new capability that we’re incredibly excited about. We’ve been working with a broad range of our customers in designing this product and really excited to announce the private preview is now available.”

Anderson spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Couchbase, a key player in the database-as-a-service realm, bolstering its Capella portfolio as it makes significant strides in the quest for AI excellence. (* Disclosure below.)

Building on the precedent set by iQ

In August, Couchbase showed off its new gen AI-powered coding assistant tagged Capella iQ. Built into the Capella Workbench, iQ has been designed to raise developer productivity by allowing tasks such as writing SQL++ queries, building indexes, defining text searches, writing application-specific code, and creating and running functional test cases, to be natural language-driven.

“[iQ] allows them to ask questions, get query definitions, for example, be able to create data and indexes — all focused on allowing developers to learn Couchbase much more quickly, and be incredibly productive when they’re interacting with data as part of Capella overall,” Anderson explained.

The company has swiftly followed up that momentum with columnar services. Apart from speeding up and streamlining data analyses, it’s also unique in that users can replicate data from operational clusters to columnar services in milliseconds. This functionality not only ensures real-time data analysis but also prevents resource contention, a critical aspect in maintaining operational efficiency, according to Anderson.

“As we’re launching Capella Columnar Service, we’re excited that [from] day one we will be supporting iQ,” he explained. “So now in both of our services, Capella overall, which supports our operational database as well as the Capella Columnar Service, developers will be able to learn much more rapidly and be much more productive using our co-pilot service, Capella iQ.”

As a company, Couchbase’s key differentiator lies in resource independence through multidimensional scaling, according to Anderson. This allows users to tailor the infrastructure based on workload needs, optimizing performance, lowering costs and ensuring workload isolation. The ability to run services co-located or on dedicated nodes gives customers the flexibility to match the right infrastructure to their specific requirements.

“Those services, if a customer wants, can run co-located on a node … or a specific compute server,” he explained. “They can co-locate only certain services and as they scale, they can isolate where those services are running on dedicated nodes.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

(* Disclosure: Couchbase Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Couchbase nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE