Getting Started with Couchbase Server

Preface

Introduction

You’ve just launched your new web application, and by happy accident, it’s gone viral and your usage has exploded from the few thousand users you originally expected to hundreds of thousands. If you are lucky, it will expand to millions within a few days.

If you are lucky, you designed your application with flexibility and expandability in mind. Depending on what environment you’ve chosen, you may have had to plan for a replication environment, using masters and slaves, or an application environment that allowed you to write to a central database, while reading from one of the replicated servers to aid performance.

With a little further planning, you may have decided to employ some kind of caching layer that allows you to store information in the RAM of your servers so that you don’t have to make so many queries to the database for information that hasn’t changed.

Surely there’s an easier way?

Couchbase Server addresses many of these problems. It has a caching layer built in, and a built-in distribution system that doesn’t require changes to your application. You can also expand your database system on the fly, without taking your application down, changing the configuration, or restarting it.

In this book, we’ve tried to distill down the key elements you need to get going with Couchbase. You’ll get to know the internal architecture and how this affects the way you build and deploy your database system. I’ll also show you how to perform key admin tasks, such as expanding ...