Membase, a new open source NoSQL database, launched

US Web infrastructure start-up NorthScale, social gaming company Zynga and South Korean search and gaming specialist NHN, have launched Membase, a new open source NoSQL database. Membase is designed for demanding web applications and is based on memcached, the in-memory caching system. Membase adds disk based persistence to memcached, along with hierarchical storage management, data replication and secure multi-tenancy support. NorthScale, founded by the leaders of the memcached project, has announced that a beta version of it's commercial enterprise version Membase Server is also available, joining their existing commercial Memcached Server offering.

NorthScale say that they wanted to create an easy-to-manage, fast and simple, elastic data management solution which offered low latency, high throughput and dynamic reconfiguration of clusters. The open source project has its own membase.org site where developers will find information on how to obtain the source or binary versions of the code to membase 1.6.0 beta 1 and instructions on how to get started. Membase components are licensed under an Apache 2.0 licence, apart from memcached itself which remains under the BSD licence.

(djwm)