The coming holiday season will test every part of the solution stack, including websites, ecommerce systems, ERPs like Oracle and SAP, supply chain systems, and the server and database infrastructure that underpins it all, across on premises, private cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud.

This whitepaper explores what your tech peers are prioritising, the five biggest risks to overcome, and three ways to evolve toward a sustainable holiday infrastructure that efficiently drives customer experience, loyalty, and revenue.

Download it now to find out why there’s never been a better time to upgrade IT infrastructure.

With the 2019 holiday season rapidly approaching, which looks to be the biggest spending year ever, enterprises need to ensure their IT infrastructure is ready for the tremendous burst in activity that will be felt across both their traditional and digital business lines.

Enterprises must ensure they have the IT capacity to meet such demands, while at the same time not overprovisioning their infrastructure during the rest of the year and incurring wasted resources and spend.

This whitepaper explores the data management challenges organisations face during peak-customer periods, and offers a database solution to complex and outdated data-management architecture.

For many web, mobile, and IoT applications that run in clustered or cloud environments, distributed caching is a key to delivering highly responsive user experiences and lowering capital and operating costs.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how different distributed caching solutions attempt to solve the common challenges of performance, manageability, and scalability. You’ll be able to compare strengths and weaknesses of three popular caching solutions: Couchbase Server, Redis, and Memcached. You’ll find out why many leading enterprises have extended their Couchbase deployments to use cases beyond caching. And you’ll see how Couchbase stacks up against top NoSQL database competitors in third-party benchmark testing.

This whitepaper from Stratecast and Frost & Sullivan provides expert advice to business technology leaders who are exploring data management strategies and solutions. This third-party research finds that relational databases are clearly obsolete for managing the vast majority of today’s data – and that making the move to NoSQL is critical to the survival of modern businesses. So, why do 94% of organisations continue to use relational databases as the core of their data management operations?

Read the report to find out:

• What fear factors are holding decision-makers back from NoSQL
• Why the barriers to NoSQL adoption are quickly beginning to crumble
• How competing NoSQL offerings are creating confusion in the market

You’ll also learn (1) why now is the right time to make your move to NoSQL, (2) how to navigate the NoSQL marketplace, and (3) how to reap the maximum benefits of NoSQL right from the start.

In this report, Forrester states that, “NoSQL has become critical for all businesses to support modern business applications,” and that, “enterprises like NoSQL’s ability to scale out using low-cost servers and a flexible, schemaless model that can store, process, and access any type of business data.”

Using a 26-criterion evaluation, Forrester identified the 15 most significant NoSQL providers and researched, analyzed, and scored them.

This report shows how each provider measures up, and helps enterprise architecture professionals select the right one for their needs. You’ll learn how top NoSQL providers are rapidly innovating – and why Couchbase was named a Leader.

NoSQL (not only SQL) databases are an alternative to SQL (relational) databases, created to get around the rigid and ageing rules of SQL. Purpose-built to cope with the demands of the altering data-landscape, NoSQL provides the scalability essential to help businesses keep pace with the web applications they are surrounded by, turning vast amounts of data into analytical insight. To fully understand NoSQL, it is helpful to firstly become familiar with what a relational database actually is.

Relational databases such as SQL categorise data in the form of tables filled with rows and columns. A query contacts the database, which responds by providing an answer. Relational bases follow a database schema; and herein lies the problem. Modern networking applications are constantly updating, with each altered state necessitating a paralleled altered schema. Considering the sheer volume of updates, the drain on resources to maintain the database would be troublesome, to say the least.

The need for an alternative

Reaching back to the 1970s, the history of databases began with the introduction of the relational database. For many years these databases were perfectly adequate and, in many scenarios, still are today, giving data a definite structure by organising it into tables supported by rows. In the time since the inception of this database, however, the internet was born.

Rising from modest beginnings, the internet is presently ubiquitous, producing incremental and differing forms of data which traditional relational databases struggle to manage. Indeed, an estimated 2.5 exabytes of data can be found in a daily snapshot of the rapidly altering data-landscape, according to Stratecasts recent report Time to Say Yes to NoSQL'. In short, the very same data which can add value to businesses is being wasted. To record and draw insightful analytics from such vast quantities, an alternative is needed.

As a mechanism, NoSQL is far less rigid and much more scalable through its use of simpler horizontal scaling. NoSQL is schema-free, allowing its databases to manage vast amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data such as web content, multimedia, email, images and so on, the types which SQL relational databases cannot effectively store. NoSQL can also respond to changing business needs due to its agility, with new types of data able to be added at a moment's notice.

Crumbling barriers to adoption

As previously mentioned, relational databases can still provide solutions, yet they are now considered obsolete for many businesses. So why aren't said businesses jumping on the NoSQL bandwagon? The mere questions suggest a degree of caution should be exercised before downing SQL tools.

Certain barriers to adoption have so far prevented universal implementation of NoSQL. These can be categorised into technology and people factors.

The main area in which NoSQL is lacking is in ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) compliance. Of the four characteristics that form ACID, it is the C' - consistency - which causes NoSQL trouble. Some NoSQL databases do offer eventual data consistency if enough time passes without an update; however, relational databases are able to maintain full consistency.

Historically, it was thought data consistency was unattainable for NoSQL due to the CAP theorem - the concept that distributed databases can only have two out of three of: consistency, availability and partition tolerance. Partition tolerance, however, most often refers to a network failure, and so, in reality, there is no choice to make. We can pick two options out of two: availability and consistency. NoSQL providers which capitalise on this are able to provide full consistency of data, removing this barrier to adoption.

Exiting the virtual realm and looking into people factors, IT departments (and people in general) can be resistant to change, preferring to use legacy systems, given their familiarity. Providers and companies may even exaggerate the capabilities of a system to avoid deep-rooted change. For instance, companies wielding Apache Hadoop tend to skirt around the point that this is still a relational database style with various limitations.

Yet as awareness of NoSQL's suitability spreads, it's becoming difficult to ignore the advantages that evolving to a new system carries. The limitations of legacy systems are becoming more apparent as companies transform digitally in order to keep up with web-based oligarchies such as Amazon and AirBNB. In response, IT Directors of enterprises large and small are unlocking the shackles of relational databases and are migrating to NoSQL to keep-pace with competition.

NoSQL database types

Of the plethora of NoSQL options available, there are four main database categories:

Key-value stores are the simplest. An item is stored with its value as a key'. These key-value pairs represent new fields.

Document orientated databases are essentially a subclass of key-value stores, pairing each key with data structures known as a document.

Graph stores use edges and nodes to represent and store information about networks of data.

Column-based stores use columns of data, instead of rows.

Which NoSQL provider to choose

The most widely deployed NoSQL solutions are presented by Stratecast's report: MongoDB, Couchbase Data Platform, Neo4j to name a few.

But what is the difference between all these providers? And more importantly, do you have time to investigate? Too many conflicting NoSQL choices are leading to market confusion. Companies are in danger of selecting the wrong provider to suit their needs, devaluing the migration. The market needs simplicity.

Stratecast's report claims Couchbase to be one of the best commercially available options on the market, pointing to its coverage of multiple NoSQL bases in its platform: a key-value store and a document store. The ability for a platform to span across NoSQL bases is where the market is headed, a destination which should eliminate guesswork from the selection process and infiltrate the last barrier to adoption.

Apple has turned FoundationDB, a NoSQL distributed database, into an open source project, with its code now available on Github.

After purchasing the company in 2015, Apple said FoundationDB would no longer be offering downloads of its software, but the company has now made its core freely available as its aims to transition into a community-driven project.

Members of the FoundationDB community are being encouraged to ask questions on community forums, help to improve the software by reporting bugs, and make contributions to the core software and documentation.

Available on Github, the renowned open source software development platform and library, FoundationDB "can become the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases" according to a post on the company's website.

"By open sourcing FoundationDB, our goal is to build an open community. All major development will be done in the open," it explained. "We've outlined a design document process to ensure that this work is done transparently and with community input.

"We've taken early steps to outline project governance to provide a basic structure that will enable members of the community who actively contribute to have a greater voice in the project decision-making."

Keen on building a cohesive and collaborative development culture, Foundation DB has also adopted a new code of conduct to govern interactions within the community.

Apple's decision to open-source FoundationDB belies its reputation for being a highly secretive company, and follows a series of similar open-sourcing moves.

The tech giant, for instance, open-sourced its programming language Swift in 2015, and made its benchmarking tools for measuring the performance of code written in Swift available on Github the following year.

FoundationDB's appeal, meanwhile, comes in the fact it retains the qualities of traditional databases built around the ACID principles of "atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability" while offering the scalability of NoSQL, whereas normally, NoSQL databases - designed around the idea of distributed systems - would require a trade-off with one of the four principles.

According to its website, FoundationDB is designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware, scaling effectively as you add machines, as well as automatically healing from hardware failures, and retaining a simple API.

The aim lies in expanding the key-value store, now open source, with "layers" that add features to model specific types of data and handle access patterns. This architecture, and its use of layers "promotes the best practices for scalable and manageable systems".

The move to open source FoundationDB, which began as a startup in 2009, is expected to please members of the community previously disheartened with Apple's decision to discontinue software downloads, with FoundationDB marking a shift in its approach towards a more community-led development strategy.

Image credit: Apple

MongoDB launched its IPO yesterday where its shares closed at $32.07 which was a 34% increase above its $24 IPO price.

Sahir Azam, MongoDB's VP of cloud, told IT Pro that the company initiated an IPO now since its been fortunate to have "really strong momentum, both in innovative startups as well as some of the most established enterprise brand names in the world".

"Although we are very proud of being a public company and everything happening today it's really just one step in a much larger journey," said Azam. "We are in a massive market, one of the largest in enterprise software, we see ourselves in a very very fortunate position to be a disruptive technology within this market.

"It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of an IPO, I think it's just one step in building an innovative technology company for the long term."

Was an IPO the ultimate goal for MongoDB? "I think it's part of the overall journey. This is by no means the end game, this is just an important step in building a scale of our business and continuing to invest to drive innovation in the market," replied Azam.

The VP of cloud thinks the company got to this position since it's part of a greater trend where developers are gaining more influence within many enterprise organisations worldwide. Software is powering more and more of the customer experience for many businesses in the world.

"As we've seen software eating the world, that same trend is what has powered MongoDB's growth all along and if anything that now combined with also the shift to cloud platform has been a real strength and accelerator to our business," explained Azam.

Azam also revealed that the company will now continue to invest in scaling its business as well as in R&D to drive innovation into their technologies.

MongoDB released 8,000,000 Class A common stock shares which began trading on the market yesterday (see below). It also granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,200,000 additional shares of Class A common stock at the same price as the other shares. This means MongoDB could raise as much as $220.8 million thanks to these additional shares.

19/10/2017: MongoDB prices its shares at $24 ahead of today's IPO

MongoDB has announced the cost of its share prices ahead of its IPO today.

There will be 8,000,000 shares of Class A common stock up for grabs at a price of $24, according to a statement. The shares are expected to begin trading on the NASDAQ Global Market today, under the symbol 'MDB', and the offering is expected to close on 23 October.

This means the company is hoping to raise $192 million from the IPO and will be valued at $1.17 billion based on its 48.9 million outstanding shares.

The company has also granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,200,000 additional shares of Class A common stock at the same price as the other shares. This means MongoDB could raise as much as $220.8 million thanks to these additional shares.

The price of the shares are higher than the estimate of the range for the IPO, which was $20-22 per share according to CNBC. The estimate was higher than the company's estimate from 6 October which priced shares at $18-20.

MongoDB revealed in September it had earned approximately $68 million in the first six months of this year ending on 31 July and $101.4 million the previous year. The database company had a net loss of $45.8 million in the first six months of this year and $86.7 million last year too.

MongoDB provides open source NoSQL databases and offers security and training to companies that use its service. Customers include the UK Met Office, Gov.uk and McAfee.

Tech IPOs faced scrutiny after a slump in June where US tech stocks lost $140 billion and fell 4%.

22/09/2017:MongoDB finally files to go public

Database software company MongoDB has filed to go public in New York.

The filing revealed the company earned approximately $68 million in the first six months of this year ending on 31 July and $101.4 million the previous year. MongoDB had a net loss of $45.8 million in the first six months of this year and $86.7 million last year.

The company also stated its subscription revenue accounts for 90% of its revenue in the fiscal year of 2017 and 91% in the last six months.

Its software has been downloaded over 30 million times since February 2009 and over 10 million times in the last 12 months. MongoDB also wrote that as of 31 July 2017 it has over 4300 customers in more than 85 countries. Its proposed NASDAQ symbol is "MDB".

A spokesperson for MongoDB told IT Pro that all information it is legally permitted to share has been filed publicly with the SEC. It cannot comment further at this time.

MongoDB provides open source NoSQL databases and offers security and training to companies that use its service. Customers include the UK Met Office, Gov.uk and McAfee.

It took advantage of a new measure introduced by the US Securities and Exchange Commission last June where companies are allowed to file for IPO's confidentially. This is designed to try and give businesses more flexibility to plan their offering and suffer less scrutiny.

Tech IPOs faced scrutiny following a slump in June where US tech stocks fell by 4%, losing $140 billion. When Snap went public earlier this year its share price fell below its initial $17 in July. It currently sits at $13.77.

16/08/2017: MongoDB 'files confidentially' for an IPO

Database giant MongoDB has confidentially filed for an IPO, according to TechCrunch.

The company has submitted an S-1 filing (the form relevant to stock market debuts) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and hopes to go public by the end of the year, the publication claimed.

MongoDB provides open source NoSQL databases, also offering security and training to companies that use its service. It has a wide range of customers including McAfee, the UK Met Office and Gov.uk.

The company was founded in 2007 and, according to the Wall Street Journal, its last valuation at the end of 2014 placed it at $1.6 billion, while it has raised a total of $311 million in equity funding.

It has taken advantage of a measure brought in by the US Securities and Exchange Commission last June to file for an IPO confidentially, designed to give companies more flexibility to plan their offering and suffer less scrutiny too.

MongoDB hired investment bankers back in May to put the IPO in motion, theWSJclaimed.

Tech IPOs raised eyebrows following a slump in June where US tech stocks tumbled by 4%, losing $140 billion. After Snap went public earlier this year,its share price fell below its initital $17offering in July. Over the last month, it has fallen to $12.74.

MongoDB offered Stitchin June, a service aimed at helping developers free up their time from writing boilerplate code by automating some backend programming. Developers can integrate the service into Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services and more.

"In confidentially filing its S-1, MongoDB is on track to become the first IPO in the non-Hadoop big data space, which stands as a pivotal milestone for the industry and provides more validation that there is life beyond analytical and relational databases. Our experience underscores this shift as well," said Greg Henry, CFO of Couchbase, another NoSQL database provider.

IT Pro has approached MongoDB for comment.

Image source: Bigstock

Consulting and outsourcing services provider Infosys has partnered with database software company MongoDB to help enterprises scale their legacy systems.

The two companies are collaborating to help businesses address issues with cost, performance and scalability of legacy database technologies.

Ravi Kumar, president and chief delivery officer at Infosys, said: "Through our collaboration, Infosys can help organisations realise the full value on MongoDB to quickly and efficiently create state-of-the-art, high performance and scalable applications. Our relationship with MongoDB and decades of association with our longstanding customers gives us the knowledge and insight to help our clients modernise their mission-critical applications."

Infosys said 1,000 of its consultants will now specialise on NoSQL database MongoDB, whose tech will be integrated into its consulting solutions.

The companies established a joint Innovation Lab in Bangalore, India, where a team of MongoDB-trained architects are working to develop tools for companies wishing to modernise their business.

Dev Ittycheria, president and chief executive officer at MongoDB, said: "This partnership will tap into the huge market opportunity of replacing legacy, monolithic applications that are inflexible to change and unable to scale with high data growth."

The partnership has already led to the development of Infosys Digital Agri Solution, technology that helps agriculture companies and farmers increase crop yields based on IoT and real time data, as well as the Infosys Field Services Command Centre, IoT-based solution for manufacturing and industrial companies.

Ittycheria added: "Infosys strengthens our ability to tackle very large scale, mission-critical applications and accelerate growth for the company. Together, we combine the three pillars needed for success - outstanding technology, the right skills, and the business smarts to deliver excellent results."

YouGov has reduced its storage needs by 70 per cent after migrating to the latest release of MongoDB's database.

The polling company collects between 2GB and 4GB of new data every hour, but at peak times the amount can be three times as high, and first turned to the NoSQL database in 2010 to store current and archived data which comprises respondents' answers to questions and their activity during an interview.

But with its recent upgrade to MongoDB 3.0, it used the compression in the database's WiredTiger engine to drastically reduce its storage requirements, which were growing as it captured ever more information.

The 3.0 release allows customers to choose between three engines to power their database - its standard read-intensive engine, a write-intensive engine and an in-memory engine.

WiredTiger powers the write-intensive engine, allowing developers to build applications that deliver between seven and 10 times better write-throughput performance while dramatically compressing data.

Jason Coombs, executive technical director at YouGov, said: "Given that we've moved to SSDs for storage, this saving is fantastic. That feature alone has pushed us to upgrade faster than we would have otherwise."

YouGov now uses MongoDB to power dozens of its applications, but the key system it supports is Gryphon, a survey system the company built itself.

All survey data enters MongoDB via Gryphon, before being sent to one of YouGov's other applications, like brand perception tool BrandIndex or consumer behaviour tracker Pulse.

Gryphon used to sit on YouGov's own database, called FastStore, but it couldn't scale globally, so the firm selected MongoDB five years ago over a rival product also being used within the company based on Microsoft SQL Server.

"That stack could not provide the speed of innovation or performance required by the Gryphon product," said Coombs.

Now, YouGov uses MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a version of the database that includes advanced software, support, certifications, and licenses.

It also uses MongoDB Cloud Manager to run, automate and back up its database, benefitting from a cluster of five shards, two of which are in the US and two of which are in Europe.

"It's less about break and fix support, and more about proactive, consultative services and tools such as planning upgrades or advice on schema design for new apps," said Coombs.

Ryanair is building an offline mobile reservations app with Couchbase to improve its customer service.

The budget airline wants to enhance communication with passengers this year, and decided an overhaul of its current app was central to succeeding in this aim.

Currently the Irish air travel firm's app is based on a hosted third-party system called Navitaire, and while it handles customer reservations and inventory, it lacks front-end usability.

Meanwhile, customers are demanding faster and more user-friendly access to a range of information about their bookings, said Ryanair's senior software engineer, Paul Sheridan.

He told IT Pro: "Ryanair has not always had the best reputation when it comes to customer service, which is why our development focus of 2015 is to communicate better with our passengers.

"We want to be responsive and agile whether we are responding to passenger queries or complaints."

The flight business was also fined 400,000 by Italy's antitrust body in January following an investigation into its customer service phoneline that found passengers faced "extreme difficulty" in trying to reach Ryanair employees to discuss their bookings.

But its current reservations app was also proving an obstacle in improving its standing with customers.

"Our current reservation system is robust. However, [it] desperately needed updating to keep up with the growing demands of our tech savvy customers," admitted Sheridan.

"Today consumers want speed, they want flexibility and they want a great experience in the palm of their hands our app just wasn't cutting it."

He added that the app is reliant on customers having a decent connection when abroad, making users susceptible to poor Wi-Fi and data roaming charges.

"We want our passengers to have constant support, anywhere in the world, whether it's access to their critical booking information or whether they need the right number to call for support when at home or abroad," he said.

Ryanair chose Couchbase over rival NoSQL database providers MongoDB and Apache Cassandra because it could provide offline access, which Sheridan said is a central feature of the forthcoming app.

Couchbase provides this functionality with three separate components Couchbase Server, a NoSQL back-end database, Couchbase Sync gateway, which allows Ryanair to sync data between users' mobile devices and the cloud, and Couchbase Lite.

Lite is an embedded NoSQL database that sits on users' smartphones or tablets to provide them with offline access to their flight information.

"Together, what this means for our passengers is the new app is really fast," said Sheridan. "We can preload and save data on their device, giving customers access to vital information any time, anywhere."

The new platform delivers other benefits over the old Navitaire system, including the ability to host a fare comparison feature that's integrated with in-app search results.

Ryanair's caching system will be supported by Couchbase so customers can find and compare fares in real-time, helping them find the best deals.

"Thanks to Couchbase, the reservation system will now be more user-friendly catering to our customer's demands," claimed Sheridan.

This is Ryanair's first project using NoSQL technology, which is designed to store unstructured data in a manageable way, and the company sees more potential for using Couchbase to improve its customer service.

For one thing, Ryanair plans to allow passengers to share their travel experiences with other customers in a safe, secure community via the app.

Sheridan hopes it will also help Ryanair learn more about its customers to provide a better service.

He said: "The new system will allow us to capture more information to improve our customer services, tailoring specific deals and amenities to different passengers."

At the time of speaking there was no official launch date for the new app, but Ryanair today announced it is closing its website and app for 10 hours from 7pm tonight to 5am tomorrow for a systems upgrade, which suggests the newly overhauled app could be introduced overnight.

Oracle is adding new analytics capabilities to Hadoop and NoSQL databases, as it aims to help people struggling to make sense of huge datasets.

Its latest set of tools, labelled Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph, targets a wider variety of datasets than the company's older solutions in this space, while cutting back on any need to move data around.

Instead, users can process data inside Hadoop while running the tool, saving time and money on analytics compared to moving the data into the cloud or another system to analyse it.

The spatial part of Oracle's tool helps examine data based on a variety of factors.

These include the proximity of the data and where it is in terms of geographical boundaries.

The spatial capabilities also allow users to find geospatial patterns like connections between different organisations, or the proximity of different clients to each other.

For example, it can look at datasets like Twitter feeds that include a zip code or street address, and add or update city, state, and country information.

It can also filter or group results based on spatial relationships, claimed Oracle, like finding how many customers are in each sales territory.

These results can be visualized on a map using its HTML5-based web mapping tool.

Meanwhile, the graph part of the tool enables the parallel in-memory analytics run in Hadoop.

Steve Pierce, CEO of Oracle partner Think Huddle, said: "With the introduction of Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph, Hadoop users will be able to enrich data based on location and use this to harmonise data for further correlation, categorisation and analysis.

"For traditional geospatial workloads, it will provide value-added spatial processing and allow us to support customers with large vector and raster data sets on Hadoop systems."