Couchbase relaxes into golden couch stuffed with 60 meellion dollars

Upstart database firm Couchbase has pulled in $60m in filthy valley lucre to help the company take business away from Oracle and IBM.

The funding round was announced on Thursday and led by WestSummit and Accel Growth Fund. It represents a big bet that new database systems are getting popular enough to steal some business away from the database incumbents.

Couchbase is a JSON document-oriented database that prides itself on its scalability, performance and ease of maintenance. It, like contemporaries MongoDB and Datastax, reckons it can use new non-relational (NoSQL) database technologies to attract not only developers, but serious enterprises, away from incumbents like Oracle and IBM.

There's some evidence that this shift has started, judging by the trouble Oracle has had in growing its new license revenue of late.

One thing that sets Couchbase apart from rivals is its mobile strategy, which has seen it cut down its "Couchbase Server" technology into a 500KB "Couchbase Lite" system that can be embedded in mobile devices.

This gives developers a way to build applications that use the same database on the mobile device and in the cloud and then link them together via the company's "Sync" service, which can be advantageous for building complex applications.

"Global adoption of NoSQL for operational big data initiatives is just beginning," said Couchbase's chief Bob Widerhold in a canned statement. "Business have spent years trying to get Oracle to efficiently scale, or looked to MongoDB to experiment with small projects on non relational infrastructures, but, as these companies become more dependent on applications that simply cannot perform or scale on MongoDB or Oracle, they are turning to Couchbase."

None of Couchbase's competitors are standing still, however. Oracle has started building additional technologies for its database products that give them some of the characteristics of the upstart companies and MongoDB has been busily making deals with big companies like Microsoft and Google to get its database in front of as many people as possible. ®