Couchbase today announced general availability of Couchbase Server 4.1. The new release adds full CRUD support, in addition to covering indexes and prepared statements to improve the speed of complex queries, and expands platform support to further accelerate the adoption of Couchbase by large enterprises and the developer community.
The new release makes it easier for developers to build agile enterprise applications on a NoSQL database that has the architecture to operate at any scale, according to Ravi Mayuram, senior vice president, products and engineering, Couchbase.
Full Support for CRUD Operations
With the release of Couchbase Server 4.1, Couchbase has extended N1QL - its query language that unites legacy SQL with modern NoSQL, providing what the company says is the best of both worlds for developers and the enterprise - and is offering full support all CRUD. According to Couchbase, most NoSQL databases provide CRUD operations through an API, or their own unique query language, which vary between providers, requiring developers to learn entirely new skills - making it harder for them to quickly write applications.
In October, Couchbase introduced N1QL, its new SQL-based query language, which makes it easy for developers familiar with SQL to build applications on top of a JSON data model.
Support of CRUD operations through standard SQL syntax makes it faster for developers to manipulate JSON documents just as simply as they would handle tables with SQL. Additionally, these new N1QL statements are fully supported in Couchbase SDKs, REST APIs, and Simba’s JDBC and ODBC drivers.
Covering Indexes and Prepared Statements
In addition, Couchbase Server 4.1 introduces two new features that reduce latency of complex queries in a distributed database environment: covering indexes and prepared statements. These two features bring performance improvements for N1QL queries that make it even easier for developers to build applications and enterprises to expand use cases running on Couchbase Server:
- Covering Indexes: a covering index is an index that contains all the fields required by a specific query. With a standard index, a query request will first scan the index for data, and then spend additional time searching for the right data to complete the query. By using a covering index, only the scan of that covering index is required for data access. The result is lower query latency and a faster performing application.
- Prepared Statements: a prepared statement enables execution of the same, or similar, query many times with high efficiency by avoiding repeated query parsing and optimization. Many applications require repeated execution of pre-defined queries with different parameters. Performing these repeated queries as ad-hoc statements requires query parsing, planning and execution each time the query is launched. Using a Prepared Statement template, where the execution plan is fixed and only specific variables are substituted each time the query is run, removes the overhead computing required to parse and compile an execution plan for these often-repeated queries. The result is lower latency and reduced CPU cycles – and a faster performing application.
Extended Platform Support
Couchbase Server 4.1 also extends support to Windows 10 and OXS El Capitan. Couchbase Server now has full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, Debian Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.