Developing with Couchbase Server

Chapter 1. Couchbase Overview

Couchbase Server is a NoSQL document database for interactive applications that has a flexible data model, is easily scalable, provides consistently high performance, and is “always on”, 24*7*365. From a developer perspective the key aspects are the flexible data structure and the always-on nature. The data model is flexible because at the core, Couchbase stores streams of bytes associated with a document ID. For additional features and practicality, that information can also be JSON-formatted (which brings additional functionality and benefits).

The scalability, performance and always-on nature are primarily focused on the administration and operations side, but they have one key impact on the developer experience. Couchbase supports applications and data loads with a very high level of concurrency. It is not uncommon to find applications with millions of active users, thousands (and more) of data operations per second, and working with some very large datasets.

The application Draw Something is a good example of a highly-concurrent application built on top of Couchbase Server. Draw Something was a smartphone application that allowed people to draw pictures, share it with friends, and let them guess what the picture depicted. As is often the case with such a simple premise, the game became very popular, very quickly. Within 6 weeks the game had gone from launch to an exceedingly popular application with:

• 15 million daily active users

• 3,000 new ...