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Couchbase Developer Preview Adds Full-Text Search, Real-Time Analytics

• By David Ramel
• November 10, 2016

Couchbase Inc. cited full-text search and real-time analytics as key capabilities of new developer previews announced this week.

Those capabilities are just two of many updates announced by the company -- which provides several NoSQL-based Big Data products and services -- at its Connect16 conference this week in Santa Clara, Calif.

The full-text search functionality comes in the new Couchbase Server 4.6.0 Developer Preview, which also features cross datacenter replication, security, query and tools updates, along with support for MAC OSX Sierra and Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Edition. Couchbase Server, which used to be called Membase, is an open source, distributed, multi-model NoSQL database optimized for interactive applications.

Regarding full-text search (FTS), a blog post published this week said: "Couchbase Server FTS runs seamlessly across your cluster and provides search capabilities similar to Elasticsearch. FTS 'just works' distributed -- you don't have to do anything special to run multi-node search distributed across your cluster -- you manage it the same way users have come to expect from Couchbase Server. For example, you can add hardware, rebalance, and Couchbase Server distributes indexes across the cluster so that the newly provisioned nodes start handling search workload. This is part of the goal: to make simple search simple, for both developers and admins."

Author Will Gardella noted FTS is part of a developer preview and will remain that way even after the server reaches general availability.

Couchbase Analytics, meanwhile, comes out in its very own developer preview as parallel data management functionality in Couchbase Server.

"Couchbase Analytics adds parallel data management to Couchbase Server to complement the capabilities offered by the Query and Index services," Gardella said in another blog post. "Couchbase Analytics is designed to efficiently run complex queries over many records. By complex queries, we mean large ad hoc join, set, aggregation, and grouping operations, any of which may result in long running queries, high CPU usage, high memory consumption, and excessive network latency in data fetching and cross node coordination. Analytics can satisfy queries so big that they require query processing from multiple nodes working together."

Gardella noted that Couchbase Analytics is programmed using SQL++ -- a newer SQL flavor that sports useful extensions -- while Couchbase Server querying is done with the N1QL language that facilitates SQL queries over JSON data. "Both SQL++ and N1QL are close to each other; in the long term, the two query languages will merge so that Couchbase Server can be queried using one single query language," he explained. "In the meantime, if you're familiar with N1QL, you should find yourself right at home in SQL++."

N1QL itself received an update -- along with many other components -- which you can read about in yet another post, this one titled "Introducing Couchbase Server 4.6.0 Developer Preview."