History of Couchbase

Couchbase is an open source, distributed cache, key value and JSON document database, that ships with a powerful and rich ANSI-compliant SQL language for easy developer adoption.

It emerged out of two open source projects, Memcached and CouchDB, to address modern scalability, performance, HA and data flexibility challenges.

Memcached is a very popular open source caching technology. However it has many inherent limitations and as a result, the original engineers of Memcached developed Membase as a drop-in replacement.

Membase started out as an enterprise ready Caching and Key Value database and eventually evolved into Couchbase when CouchDB engineers added JSON document support.

As a result, Couchbase is a drop-in replacement for Memcached deployments as well as a powerful key-value and document database. In one consolidated solution you get the performance benefits of a cache and the persistence guarantees of a database.

{
	"Couchbase addresses inherent Memcached Limitations" : [
  	{
  		"#" : 1, 
  		"problem" : "No clustering, difficult to manage individual instances",
  		"solutions" : [ "Clustered & distributed from the get-go", 
  		  		"120+ monitoring stats for easy maintance",
  		  		"Rich Web UI for easy management",
  		  		"Easy Programmatic management using REST/CLI"],
  		"solved" : true
  	},
  	{
  		"#" : 2,
  		"problem" : "Cold Cache",
  		"solutions" : [ "A consolidated Cache & Key Value database",
  		  		"Warm-up from local disk"],
  		"solved" : true
  	},
  	{
  		"#" : 3,
  		"problem" : "No high availability, crash == stampeding herd!",
  		"solutions" : [ "Built-in Replication for high availability & Disaster Recovery",
  		  		"Automatic failover"],
  		"solved" : true
  	},
  	{
  		"#" : 4,
  		"problems" : [ "Key loss during scale out (Ketama hashing)", 
  		  		"Manual code/config changes and app restarts required"],
  		"solutions" : [ "Hash based auto-sharding == even data distribution == NO hot-spots",
  		  		"100% Key availability during scale out",
  		  		"Easily scale w/o touching app code/config & w/o restarting servers"],
  		"solved" : true
  	}
 ]
}

Today, the original engineers of both open source technologies continue to work for Couchbase, adding cutting edge innovations and continuously improving performance and scale.

Key Couchbase Features

Couchbase provides a robust foundation focused on scale, performance and high availability for mission critical applications. On top of this solid foundation, Couchbase has added powerful developer features. In a nutshell it satisfies the needs of Architects/Operations & Developers.

1. Enterprise grade Caching, Key-Value and Document database solution
2. High availability and Disaster Recovery
   • Intelligent rack/zone aware replication
   • Auto-failover
   • Cross data center replication
3. Comprehensive monitoring stats and programmatic management via REST/CLI
4. Security
   • Encryption over the wire,
   • On disk Encryption
   • LDAP/AD integration, roles and auditing
5. SQL (ANSI compliant) for JSON documents
   • Reuse SQL skills to easily query documents
   • Extended SQL for JSON structures (embedded documents, collections) and flexible data models
   • Use prepared statements and even cache query plans
   • ODBC/JDBC connectors
6. Global secondary indexes
   • Improve SQL query performance
   • Queries can use multiple indexes (intersect-scans)
   • Filters/Partial indexes using WHERE predicates
   • Covering indexes
   • Function based indexes
7. Views (distributed indexes) built using incremental map/reduce
   • Great for near realtime aggregations
   • Composite indexes for powerful view queries
   • Built in reducers for counts, sums, stats
   • Geo-spatial & multi-dimensional indexes and queries
8. Multi-dimensional scaling
   • Scale up or out
   • KV, query & index workload isolation
9. Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, ES/Solr connectors
10. Embedded database and Synchronization platform
    • For offline/online mobile apps
    • Great for IOT use cases
11. Full Text indexes and scored search results (developer preview)

The 4 principles of Couchbase

Couchbase is built about 4 principles

1. Consistent High Performance at Scale

   • A single commodity server can support hundreds of thousands of operations per second
   • Sub-millisecond latency (< 1ms at the 95% percentile)
   • High performance reads, writes and mixed workloads

2. Easy & Affordable Scalability

   • Scale with a few clicks (so easy my computer illiterate mother can do it)
   • Scale Linearly
   • Small clusters (3 to 10 servers) can handle extremely high throughput @ <1ms latency
   • Scale to billions of items

3. Enterprise level High Availability and Easy Maintenance

   • Easily (again my mother can do it) replicate up to 3 times
   • Intelligently replicate with Rack/Zone awareness, allowing for multiple server failures, even with one replica copy
   • All maintenance tasks can be done with zero downtime
   • Replicate an entire database(s) across multiple data-centers for Disaster recovery

4. Flexible data model with Flexibly Queries

   • No need to define rigid schemas, change or extend schema at runtime
   • JSON natively maps to application objects
   • Extremely suited to agile development
   • Use SQL to flexible express queries over your flexible data structure! (No need to learn a bespoke query API)
   • Full text search (developer preview)

In the next blog post, Part 2: Couchbase architecture in a Nutshell, we dive into the nuts & bolts of Couchbase architecture, explaining how it elegantly implements these core principles into its design.