Additional changes to the Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service will enhance its ability to handle both operational and analytical workloads and leverage vector search capabilities – critical for AI applications – from anywhere.

Couchbase is enhancing the combined operational and analytical capabilities of its Capella database-as-a-service with expanded columnar and vector search functionality to enable the development of the next generation of “adaptive” applications — including those with AI capabilities.
The company also launched Capella free tier access this week that allows developers to start working with the cloud database, including the ability to learn Capella at their own pace and use community-supported extensions.
“We work at the center of AI, real-time analytics, mobile and edge — which are all major opportunities,” Matt McDonough, Couchbase’s senior vice president of product and partners, said in an interview. CRN,
[Related: The Coolest Database System Companies Of The 2024 Big Data 100]
Couchbase, one of the leading next-generation database providers, offers Capella as a platform for developing enterprise applications for operational, transactional, and other functions. HeySearch, mobile, and analytical functions.
Company Capella launchedCapella, a fully managed and automated cloud database based on the company’s Couchbase database server, will be available on Amazon Web Services in 2021. Capella was promoted as providing developers with greater flexibility and performance at scale for enterprise applications.
This week Couchbase announced the general availability of Capella Columnar on AWS, which makes it possible to develop enterprise applications that incorporate real-time data analysis capabilities alongside operational workloads within a single database.
Developing applications on a single database that incorporate operational and analytical functions has traditionally been a challenge. Structured data is often stored and transmitted between applications using the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.
But JSON can be difficult to use for traditional analytics systems, according to Couchbase. By supporting mixed analytical-transactional processing, Capella Columnar addresses the challenge of “parsing, transforming, and maintaining JSON data into an analysis-ready columnar format,” supporting real-time, multi-source ingestion of data from Couchbase and other data sources, according to the company’s announcement.
McDonough said the Capella Columnar essentially acts as a data store for generative AI applications.

Vector search from anywhere

The company also announced the general availability of Couchbase Mobile with Vector Search, which provides both similarity and hybrid search across mobile and edge applications. Vector Search, a key database functionality for data-hungry AI applications, indexes and stores data using vector embeddings that speed up data query, search, and retrieval.
“That’s really important for building AI capabilities,” McDonough said. “I think that’s unique with Couchbase. We offer vector search no matter where you are, on mobile or at the edge in a disconnected environment. We offer vector everywhere. I think that’s one of our key differentiators.”
Couchbase said Capella columnar and mobile vector search capabilities reduce the costs and complexities of developing “adaptive applications” that run from the cloud to the edge. Couchbase uses “adaptive applications” to describe the next generation of “hyper-personalized, contextualized” business applications, McDonough said.
And McDonough said the new free tier announcement is key to these announcements by providing “a consistent free tier with generous hibernation periods” for test development use cases.
The Capella free tier is a free developer environment that allows developers “to evaluate and explore products without time constraints and test new features,” according to the Couchbase news announcement. Developers also have access to a number of community-supported extensions like cbshell 1.0 and plugins like Ionic Capacitor for Couchbase Lite. The free tier is available through Sept. 9.
McDonough said the advancements in Couchbase Capella are being well received by the company’s channel partners — particularly systems integrators — from whom customers are looking for guidance in AI and generative AI. “And what are the different building blocks that drive AI? [customers] “There’s a lot we need to do to be successful in building AI-based applications,” McDonough said. “I think our story really fits that perfectly.”
These announcements are also being welcomed by ISVs and cloud service providers that develop solutions on the Couchbase Capella platform. “Performance and scale, that’s been our play,” McDonough said. “That’s critical for AI applications.”
“Real-time operations and analytics require easy access to data from diverse sources across the business,” said Paul Mc Farland, senior vice president of partner and innovation ecosystem at Confluent, the leading developer of real-time streaming data technology. “Confluent’s end-to-end data streaming platform for Apache Kafka and Apache Flink captures events from any system and feeds them into Couchbase Capella for real-time insights at scale,” Mc Farland said in a statement. “Together with Couchbase, we empower businesses with the secure, governed, high-quality data and analytics needed to power the next generation of real-time customer experiences and operational workloads.”