David Ostrovsky

Getting Started with Couchbase Server

Relational databases have dominated the data landscape for over three decades. Emerging in the 1970s and early 1980s, relational databases offered a searchable mechanism for persisting complex data with minimal use of storage space. Conserving storage space was an important consideration during that era, due to the high price of storage devices. For example, in 1981, Morrow Designs offered a 26 MB hard drive for

Couchbase Lite on Android

3,599—which was a good deal compared to the 18 MB North Star hard drive for

Synchronizing Data with the Couchbase Sync Gateway

4,199, which had appeared just six months earlier. Over the years, the relational model progressed, with the various implementations providing more and more functionality.

Working with Views

Mobile devices have become such an integral part of modern life that most of us cannot imagine living without them. Forty years after Motorola introduced the first commercial handheld phone, there are now an estimated 6.8 billion cellular subscriptions in the world, nearly equal to the total world population of 7.25 billion. In addition to a rapid growth in usage, mobile devices experienced an evolution, becoming a premier computing platform connected to the Internet and packed full of applications.

Couchbase Lite on iOS

The preceding two chapters covered how Couchbase Lite is going to change the lives of upstate New York residents (and the rest of us as well) by bridging the gap between connected and offline mobile apps. A local database is very useful for all kinds of apps, but it becomes truly awesome when given the ability to synchronize data between the mobile database and a centralized server. The Couchbase Sync Gateway is a server-side component of the Couchbase ecosystem that provides connectivity and synchronization between Couchbase Server and any number of Couchbase Lite instances.

CRUD and Key-Based Operations

Key-based operations provide an efficient mechanism for accessing data, and key-value stores often provide better performance than other data-access approaches. However, relying solely on keys to access complex data can be very limiting. Document databases provide a more flexible approach for querying data based on the content of the documents they store. Every document database provides different querying techniques. In Couchbase there are two different ways to query document content: views and the N1QL query language, which is covered in Chapter 6.

Designing Document-Oriented Databases with Couchbase

The preceding chapter introduced Couchbase Lite, the first mobile NoSQL database. During the first part of that chapter, we discussed Couchbase Lite’s use cases and architecture. In this chapter, we are going to dive immediately into the technical aspects of using Couchbase Lite on iOS. If you haven’t read Chapter 14 yet, we strongly recommend that you read at least the first section, as an introduction to this chapter.

Advanced Couchbase Techniques

So far in this book, you’ve installed and configured Couchbase, modeled your document database, and used the Client SDKs to perform basic retrieve and create operations. Because Couchbase is both a key-value store and a document database, you can access data in three fundamentally different ways. As a key-value store, which is essentially a large hash table, Couchbase provides very fast inserts and retrievals by key. As a document database, Couchbase lets you index and query data through views and, as of version 4.0, a new SQL-like query language called N1QL, which stands for “Non-1st Normal Form Query Language” and is pronounced “nickel.” Views will be covered in the next chapter, and N1QL will be discussed in Chapter 6. Of the three methods, key-based access is the more efficient, but it is also inherently less flexible.

Sizing and Deployment Considerations

One of the biggest challenges when moving from relational databases to NoSQL is the shift one needs to make in the way one designs a database solution. Considering the fact that most NoSQL solutions differ from one another, this change of mindset can become frustrating. This chapter covers how to design a database using Couchbase’s style of document-oriented design mixed with key-value capabilities.

Monitoring and Best Practices

In the previous four chapters you’ve learned about the various SDKs, key-based operations, views, and the N1QL language. But just knowing how to store and retrieve data does not immediately translate into being a deadly Couchbase coding ninja. To be fair, being able to use the CRUD operations and indexed queries is enough for quite a few different applications. However, real production systems, enterprise software, and various web-scale applications have requirements beyond just using a database.