Couchbase's chief techie on squaring the schema-less circle

Couchbase is a JSON document database with global users including PayPal, eBay, and travel distribution system Amadeus, companies with a combined revenue of nearly $40 billion. Its total annual income was $154.8 million, so why is such a small database outfit trusted by big biz? We caught up with CTO Ravi Mayuram to find out …

[Charlie Clark]

Self-contradictory

These were not available when the relational systems were built, so they are showing their age. We wanted to build something that would stand the test of time, just like relational systems did.

If something is "showing its age", it can't also be "standing the test of time".

Schemas are a must but the problem isn't with schemas per se but making changes to them over time. This is perfectly possible with the transrelational approach but the industry has found more money can be made with others…

[MrTonyD]

Re: Self-contradictory

Database systems "show their age" in many ways. Performance. Security. Scalability. Reliability. Administerability. When you look at the early databases, even pre-SQL, they were nothing like what we use today. Even when SQL was first introduced, it was widely criticized as an incomplete language and incapable of many desired capabilities. At the same time, SQL became quite popular since it allowed even moderately technical users to access big datasets. In that sense, it has stood the test of time. If you look at modern databases, they all try to overcome the traditional problems with early databases, and still allow "easy" access. And any claim that "schemas are a must" or that non-transactional is purely pursued for money simply makes no sense to me. Hadoop, Spark, and many others now being applied to create AI applications have proven this again and again. The world has changed, and as if we want our business to survive and thrive we need to keep up.