NorthScale, in partnership with Zynga and NHN, has launched the membase open source project, a NoSQL database management system designed to be simple, fast, and elastic, providing an alternative for users who have been stretching the capabilities of memcached beyond its intended use as a transient data cache. Membase, hosted at membase.org, offers features such as persistence, replication, and dynamic cluster configuration while maintaining compatibility with memcached, allowing existing applications to store data more efficiently and cost-effectively without altering any code. The initiative stems from the realization that while relational databases are suitable for certain data classes, there is a demand for a system that can provide higher performance and easier data storage across scaling needs, fulfilling the desire for a more robust solution akin to memcached but with enhanced capabilities.