Exploring couchbase server - datascape podcast episode 19

On today’s show we welcome Terry Dhariwal to take us further into our exploration of NoSQL databases and talk about Couchbase Server. Terry started his career as a developer in 2003 after completing a computer science degree. His love of coding and passion for the cloud naturally pushed him towards web applications and backend systems. Terry unpacks Couchbase’s three separate products; Couchbase Server, the focus of today’s episode, which essentially stores documents and binary blobs; Couchbase Analytics, which is a data warehouse; and Couchbase Mobile, a lite version of the technology, which is smart device friendly. Terry takes us through a brief history of Couchbase, looking at its origins in Membase and CouchDB, before detailing a bit more of what makes Couchbase special. The four pillars of the company that were set in place from the start were consistent performance, horizontal scaling, high availability, and flexibility. Through today’s episode we hear about these, how they have influenced the software and how the software can be useful to you.

Key points from this episode:

• What is Couchbase and why does it exist?
• NoSQL vs relational databases.
• The different solutions available through Couchbase.
• The problems that Couchbase Server solves.
• The history of Couchbase as a company.
• The importance of flexibility for customers.
• Membase – the original form of Couchbase.
• How iterative improvements of the technology have developed.
• Prevention of workload contention within the system.
• The relationship of the software to different pieces of hardware.
• The four pillars of Couchbase and how they were decided upon.
• Automatic and even distribution of data in Couchbase.
• Key differences between Couchbase and MongoDB and Cassandra.
• Memory assignment within the database.
• Consistency versus latency trade-offs.
• Data, global index and other services.
• Architecture of the nodes and servers.
• Recovery and backing up and the mechanisms for this.
• Automatic sharding, replication, MDS and other stand-out features.
• Practical applications and usage examples of the software.
• Terry answers the Lightning round.
• And much more!

Links mentioned in today’s episode: