Cloud database-as-a-service provider Couchbase Inc. today launched a new columnar service for its Capella platform on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud platform.

The company says the new service, announced at AWS re:Invent 2023, makes it easier for companies to leverage real-time analytics to build more adaptive software applications.

Capella’s columnar service brings a columnar store and data integration into the Capella DaaS platform, enabling the real-time analysis of data on the same cloud platform where enterprises run many of their operational workloads, the company said. This convergence of operational and real-time analytics capabilities within one data platform will help to reduce friction and ensure superior application user experiences, it added.

Couchbase Capella is a cloud-hosted version of the Couchbase NoSQL database that is used to power complex business applications. Unlike traditional databases, such as Oracle Database, Capella can process both structured and unstructured data at the same time, making it a more flexible choice for certain kinds of apps.

The ability to handle multiple kinds of data means Capella can serve as a data cache, too. So companies can use just one system in Capella, rather than using three separate systems — a database for structured data, a data store for unstructured information, and a data cache.

With the addition of the columnar service, Couchbase said, it’s eliminating the need for organizations to process, reformat and move data, first from transactional to operational systems, and from there, to analytical systems. The company cites a report from Forrester Research about the need for this capability. It said the need for data movement is a serious hindrance to the development of applications that can make decisions in real time. “Disparate data stacks also compromise the delivery of timely data to various applications, operational systems and into the analytics workflow, resulting in missed business opportunities,” Forrester’s report said.

Moreover, with the growing adoption of artificial intelligence systems and applications, the use of disparate data platforms adds further complexity and often confuses AI models, the company said. Capella columnar solves these headaches by performing operational and real-time analytics on data within a single platform, reducing latency to deliver enhanced experiences for end users.

The company cited a number of benefits to customers, including improved agility and performance for applications, and stream ingestion from enterprise data sources in real-time. The integrated data platform also makes life much easier for developers, Couchbase promised, as it uses the same SQL++ query language across operational and analytical applications.

It means developers with knowledge of the Structured Query Language can build simplified apps using a single query language, rather than two different ones. Not least, the company said the convergence of operational and real-time analytics in a single platform will significantly reduce the cost and complexity of applications.

Scott Anderson, Couchbase’s senior vice president of product management and management and business operations, said real-time analytics is key to the delivery of more intelligent, adaptive and hyper-personalized applications. “With columnar in our Capella DBaaS, for the first time organizations can easily build adaptive applications powered by real-time analytics in a single JSON-based platform,” he said. “We are eliminating the latency gap that has forever existed between analytics and operational databases.”

The Capella columnar service is said to leverage a number of AWS services that form the basis of its product architecture, and will provide connectors to data sources such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Document DB, Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon SageMaker for AI development.

Image: Couchbase