New major database releases from Couchbase and Cassandra

Couchbase polishes multi-model credentials while first Cassandra release in 6 years is about performance, stability and cloud

Couchbase Server 7.0

Today, Couchbase announced the general availability of Couchbase Server 7.0. The company, one of a number who have helped popularise open-source NoSQL databases as an alternative to traditional enterprise RDBMS systems, says the latest release further bridges the gap between relational databases and collection-oriented systems.

Aimed at developers who want to develop and deploy on the same platform the company says: "Couchbase Server 7.0 eliminates the key friction points that have kept enterprises from modernising their relational-based applications, giving them the agility and flexibility to accelerate the development of modern business-critical applications."

New and enhanced features in the latest version include: multi-document SQL ACID transactions; schema and table-like organising structures called ‘Scopes and Collections', allowing developers to make runtime updates on the fly; and configurable backup and related enhancements which Couchbase says improve operational performance. Other enhancements are laid out in a blog post.

"With Couchbase Server 7.0, the relational versus non-relational database debate is over. Modern developers no longer have to struggle with having multiple databases- a relational database for transactionality, and a non-relational database for flexibility and scale," said Ravi Mayuram, senior vice president of engineering and CTO at Couchbase in a statement.

Couchbase Server is available as a free community version or as enterprise versions with proprietary add-ons and a range of support packages.

Apache Cassandra 4.0

Another database that's reached a major version is Apache Cassandra. Finally achieving general availability this week, Cassandra 4.0 boasts numbers enhancements and refinements for deployment in the cloud and on Kubernetes.

"The overarching goal of the 4.0 release is that Cassandra 4.0 should be at a state where major users would run it in production when it is cut," its maintainer said in a blog post

"Consistent with that goal, Cassandra 4.0 is running in production today at Apple, DataStax, Instaclustr, Netflix, Orange, Pythian, Sky UK, Yelp, and many more."

4.0 is the first major Cassandra release for six years. However, future versions will follow an annual cadence, with each major release supported for three years.

Maintainers say they have made more than a thousand bug fixes using a variety of testing and code correctness techniques including property-based and fuzz testing, replay testing, performance testing and fault injection.

Enhancements are mainly designed to improve stability and performance, but there have been multiple improvements in privacy features, auditing, logging, synchronisation, compression and making Cassandra configuration a little more user-friendly.

Contributor Ben Bromhead said Cassandra 4.0 is "a turning point, providing an incredibly stable base to build on… it will be the most stable release of a database ever shipped."

Committer Ekaterina Dimitrova said: "Cassandra is the best choice for any transactional workload that needs to be always on and scale quickly and easily , ready to grow at a moment's notice."