The database wars are about to kick off in spectacular style. Not just Oracle vs SAP – as Big Red announced its new in-memory database at the start of this week – but relational vs NoSQL.

Oracle and SAP have been making plenty of noise about their in-memory capability; SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott once claimed that its HANA technology was “the fastest growing software product in the history of the world”, whilst in his recent event keynote, Larry Ellison claimed that data would move at “ungodly speeds” in the Oracle 12c database.

But that’s all relational, SQL database technology – and the NoSQL brigade is coming up fast.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out which side Bob Wiederhold, CEO and president of NoSQL database provider Couchbase, sits on. And his company’s ready for the battle ahead, with the release earlier this month of Couchbase Lite, claimed as the …