nosqlChatting with Bob Wiederhold, CEO with Couchbase was just like a blast from the past for GoMo News. We began to talk about databases when he started to explain why his company, Couchbase, had decided to move into the mobile segment. The chief reason has to do with database technology. Namely unstructured versus structured data. Historically, Couchbase has thrown its weight behind unstructured data which is an ideal approach for the mobile sector. Examples here are photos and videos which have to be married somehow with the likes of Facebook & email.

All of this matters if you are a mobile app developer and wondering what approach to take with your data.

If you’re working on a product then you want to run as efficiently as possible on a mobile device.

As Bob Wiederhold explained to GoMo News, with NoSQL technology you can squeeze a pretty powerful database onto the storage space available on a typical smartphone or tablet.

We checked with Bob and the old litmus test (from our Computing days) still holds true – if the database is powerful enough then you can run a decent web site using it.

Bob reckons it would be entirely feasible to run a web site on a smartphone using Couchbase’s technology.

He did, however, look a bit puzzled as to why anyone would want to do such a thing. Never mind that, it is possible. And that’s what matters.

Incidentally, GoMo News reckons that you’d have to find a smartphone or tablet which supports the very latest version of Wi-fi (802.11ac) to get the speed to interface the web site fast enough with the Internet. Well, as our friends at D-Link have explained before (See our previous story here), at the time of writing at least only one handset – the Samsung Galaxy S4 actually does support 802.11ac. By Tony Dennis  Read more