Author: Sean Michael Kerner (Internet News)
In a move that is all about scalability- memcached vendor Membase is merging with NoSQL vendor CouchOne. The new company will be called Couchbase.
CouchOne is the commercial entity led by CouchDB founder Damien Katz. I’ve written about CouchDB a few times over the years and I use the database myself (as do millions of Ubuntu users) everyday. CouchOne started off as a company called Couchio, before it changed its name in 201.
Membase on the other hand started out as memcached vendor NorthScale that grew their own NoSQL/memcached database, called ..Membase.
Personally, I had always thought that CouchDB already had pretty decent scalability, but the new merger aims to expand that.
The new merged entity is set to rename the Membase Server as Elastic Couchbase. Elastic Couchbase will include Membase, memcached and CouchDB.
Couchbase will continue to market a non-clustered version of CouchDB as well as a mobile version.
What I don’t understand is how this new effort will impact the underlying Apache CouchDB effort. Will items that might otherwise have gone into CouchDB for scalability now go into the Elastic CouchBase?
It will be interesting to see how non-Couchbase backers of CouchDB respond to this merger. If there are those that are unhappy, will we see a fork? Since Katz really is one of the leading voice in the ongoing development of CouchDB, I don’t think that’s likely, but only time will tell.
