Couchbase 3.0 Announced

Couchbase Inc. is doubling down on the in-memory component of its namesake database with a new version it calls the most significant iteration of the platform in its three-year history. Among the more than 200 features and enhancements introduced with the landmark update are several distinctive capabilities that up the performance ante against competing non-relational systems such as MongoDB and Cassandra.

Need for speed

Standing out from the new functions that Couchbase Server 3.0 brings to the table is a new tiering option that enables admins to tune how much data is stored in memory and how much is written to disk while a process is running. That functionality makes it possible to manage an application almost as if it were a cloud service, tuning the hardware resources depending on how fast data needs to be processed at any given moment.

To further simplify the task of adapting for changing workload requirements, the upgrade brings with it an automated utilization management tool that optimizes read and writes depending on the underlying infrastructure, whether it be a traditional disk array or a high-performance flash pool. But the new release doesn’t stop there. In addition to improving application response times, Couchbase Server 3.0 also harnesses memory to make the database environment itself considerably speedier.

The platform achieves that with something called Database Change Protocol, or DCP, an extension to the core architecture that handles communications in and between clusters via memory rather than disk. The result, according to Couchbase, is up to a 100- fole improvement in the speed at which inter-node traffic is delivered, 50 times faster indexing and as much as four times less latency when replicating data across multiple data centers. The release also allows users to pause and resume the transfer process as needed, a convenience aimed at enabling practitioners carry out maintenance work with less interruption.

Catering to the enterprise

Continuing the performance theme, the new version comes integrated with a new open tool for processing key-value pairs, a type of workload that Couchbase struggles to handle. ForestDB, as the technology is known, elevates that limitation and then some: the company claims that it can outperform alternatives, such as the Google-developed LevelDB and Facebook Inc.’s RocksDB fork, by a wide margin.

ForestDB, which is currently in beta, is one of over a dozen additions introduced with the latest version to plug strategic functionality holes, mostly concerning enterprise requirements. It’s joined by comprehensive traffic encryption, the ability to prioritize certain datasets over others and more restoration options described as up to 8 times faster than the existing mode.

For developers, Couchbase Server 3.0 provides new SDKs that standardizes commands and methods across all programming languages and adds support for JSON, the de facto format for moving data among web applications. Plus, the SDKs provide integration with a number of popular development frameworks and N1QL, a homegrown query syntax meant to allow organizations to tap into employees’ existing SQL knowledge.