To celebrate National Cloud Database Day, we are announcing the latest advancements of Couchbase Capella Spring 2023 release, and its imminent incorporation of Couchbase Server 7.2. These Capella advancements offer expanded use case support, programming environment integrations, scaling improvements, and expanded deployment options. Capella will imminently support Couchbase Enterprise Server 7.2, available now for download, which adds another multi-model data access method, enhances document change tracking and streaming, introduces cost-based query optimization to the Analytics Service, improves Magma’s storage block compression options, and includes many reliability improvements.

Today’s Capella updates coincide with National Cloud Database Day, occurring annually on June 1st. We first established the official National Day in 2022, encouraging industry-wide celebration to raise awareness that cloud databases are the backbone of modern applications. Check out this message from our team on the future of cloud databases and how they impact our everyday lives. You can showcase your cloud database spirit by sharing posts on social media using the downloadable logo and hashtags: #NationalCloudDatabaseDay #CloudDBday.

New Use Case Support for Capella and Server 7.2 

Capella offers Memory-only buckets for new use cases

Memory-only buckets can now be configured from the Capella control plane, when creating a new database bucket. Known in the Couchbase community as ephemeral buckets, this feature extends Capella’s utility for use cases that rely on caching services only, and on systems that feature transient (use-and-forget-it) data that is not necessary to persist permanently.

This feature now allows buckets to be defined as memory-only, alongside disk-based storage in Couchbase Magma (high-density) or Couchstore (traditional) internal storage engines.

Couchbase Enterprise Server 7.2 supports Time Series data 

Time series data is both highly structured and voluminous—often able to overwhelm traditional databases with rows and rows of measurements taken at frequent intervals. Couchbase has taken a novel approach to supporting time series data by ingesting and fitting it into JSON array structures. This gives the entire Couchbase product line the ability to offer time series data access without increasing the complexity of the database’s operation or behavior.

Time series support also adds new functions for pre-formatting data prior to ingestion into a time series array, as well as functions for extracting and parsing that data for use in applications or analytics.

There are additional benefits to using JSON as the time series container in Couchbase, including fast processing and retrieval, use of a single index to access the array, high-density storage with improved compaction, and flexible assembly and decoding of the array for use in applications and analytics.

The introduction of Time Series support in Couchbase has also driven the expansion of development in the underlying storage operation of Couchbase Magma, the high-density key-value store that underpins the Couchbase database. For this release, we have introduced new block size configuration settings to make disk compression more efficient. Block sizes by default are set to 4096 bytes and are now adjustable to a maximum of 131072 bytes. Using larger block sizes may result in greater compression. An estimation utility is also available in Magma to advise users on block size compression ratios to expect, given their document capacity requirements.

Couchbase Capella adds developer integrations

Couchbase Capella now offers integrations with the popular developer platform, Netlify, and has released an official VSCode extension, making application development with these tools more seamless for developers.

Couchbase Server 7.2 adds Change-Data Capture features

Server 7.2 offers the ability to log and stream all document changes in a collection or bucket via Kafka. This allows developers to use a document’s change history as programmatic inputs to their application. Use cases for this feature include:

    • Developing a persistent audit trail for data changes
    • Triggering downstream business processes that are listening for these changes via Kafka
    • Expanding future development with integrations to include feeding the Eventing services with change history as well as creating a change stream API for Couchbase SDKs

Couchbase Server 7.2 adds cost-based query optimization to the Analytics service

Couchbase Analytics service has adopted the same CBO features available in the SQL++ query service. This patented optimization utility will help analytic queries run as efficiently as possible. This optimizer uses a sample-based approach to support complex analytic queries. Sampling is drawn from the Analytics collection metadata during the query planning stage of query execution.

Capella adds Hibernation and Dynamic disk expansion

Capella will support both dynamic disk expansion to scale storage automatically, as well as the ability to hibernate inactive clusters, making the service more efficient and cost-effective.

Couchbase Capella expands its deployment options

    • Capella adds 10 new cloud service provider regions
    • Capella adds larger instance sizes across all three major cloud providers
    • Capella is available for purchase in all three major cloud provider marketplaces
    • Capella is HiPAA compliant on Google Cloud
    • Capella supports Private Endpoints on Microsoft Azure 

Couchbase Server 7.2 adds Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability improvements

    • Alert for Low Indexer Resident Percentage when Index service resources are nearing critical levels.
    • Index Redistribution flag for partitioned indexes. This flag allows finer control over when indexes and partition indexes are moved during rebalances.
    • Expanded status metrics for Data Service warmup via the Prometheus open metric endpoint to feed alerting dashboards.
    • Expanded metrics for inbound replication activity in cross datacenter replication (XDCR)
    • TLS certificate management improvements including automatic validation checking for the Subject Alternative Names (SAN) hosts information, inclusion of the Capella CA certificate in Server 7.2 clusters to facilitate hybrid XDCR support out of the box, and the depreciation of support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1.
    • Support for current Linux operating systems is added for: RedHat RHEL 9, Oracle Linux 9, AWS Linux 2023, Ubuntu 22 LTS and Apple MacOS 12
    • Support for the following operating systems has been dropped for: RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Oracle Linux 7, Ubuntu 18 LTS, SUSE Linux 12 versions older than SP2, and MacOS 10.15

Next steps

Try out the new features via the cloud or with a download:

Author

Posted by Jeff Morris, VP Product Marketing

Jeff Morris is VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Couchbase. He's spent over three decades marketing software development tools, databases, analytic tools, cloud services, and other open source products. He'd be the first to tell you that anyone looking for a fast, flexible, familiar, and affordable cloud-to-edge database-as-a-service can stop looking after they check out Couchbase.

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