Excitement and interest in mobile apps and the Internet of Things continues to grow at an accelerated pace. Vendors are rushing to lay claim to these terms in any way they can. Today DataStax is the latest to jump on the bandwagon, announcing “DSE 4.6 – The Leading Database Platform for IOT, Web and Mobile Applications”. That is a lofty claim, followed by a press release that nowhere addresses the need for managing mobile and IoT data on the device or in the cloud.
Before we look at the technology requirements for mobile and IoT applications, let’s look at what businesses are actually trying to do. As always, today’s enterprises are looking for the next big competitive advantage. And as every business continues to be impacted by the world’s move to online and mobile computing, businesses are looking to deliver a better experience to customers online – however they get online, from a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, a watch or whatever. Businesses such as banks, travel companies, retailers, etc. need to provide a rich, personalized contextualized experience – delivering the right message or offer at the right moment and from the right device.
If delivering highly interactive, personalized, always available experiences is the goal, what are the requirements?
There are three entry-level must haves for an IoT, mobile or web-distributed database:
1. Embedded Database.
The platform must provide an embedded database that runs inside apps on the mobile or IoT device. If the app has to make round-trips to the cloud for every read and write, performance will suffer, and so will the customer's experience.
2. Always Available.
The data must be readable and writable from the device whether there is an Internet connection or not. Otherwise, customers are subject to the availability and quality of a network connection — which, as we all know, is often weak or non-existent. So without a local data store, the customer's experience will be compromised.
3. Secure Data Synchronization (multi-master).
Finally, to store data on the device and in the cloud, the data management platform must provide secure multi-master synchronization. Data on the device and in the cloud should be able to easily and automatically sync.
Absent a mobile database, DataStax is not a mobile or IoT database platform.
Customer expectations for mobile experiences are rising. Businesses must enable customers to have contextualized, always available, highly performant interactions. Which means you must have a local data store. This is where the market is going. This is why Couchbase built a complete NoSQL database platform that meets all the requirements for web, mobile and IoT applications, and more. Couchbase Mobile includes an embedded mobile database for the device (Couchbase Lite) with read / write capability from the device and secure multi-master synchronization through Couchbase Sync Gateway.
Learn more about Couchbase Mobile.
I don\’t really see couchbase scaling clusters into the 10s of thousands of members though.