The first Developer Preview of Couchbase Analytics has been announced and it goes on to add parallel data management to the Couchbase Server. The company informs that this has increased the spectrum of queries which Couchbase Server handles without compromising the basic design principles of being agile fast and elastic.
The company states,
“Analytics Developer Preview 1 is an early sneak peek, the earliest we could release that shows the basic functionality and interface. There’s a lot yet to come, including integration with Couchbase Server so that Analytics behaves like a proper Couchbase service in the sense of Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). For now, Analytics runs alongside a Couchbase Server instance and synchronizes with the data service using DCP, but it’s otherwise standalone.”
Couchbase Analytics goes on to add parallel data management to Couchbase Server so as to complement the capabilities which are offered by Query and Index services. The Couchbase Analytics has been designed for efficient running of comple queries over many records. By complex queries, the company means large ad hoc join, set, aggregation and grouping operations.
The company states,
“Analytics can satisfy queries so big that they require query processing from multiple nodes working together.”
The Couchbase Analytics approach has significant advantages compared to alternatives, as provided by the official blog:
- Common data model: Couchbase Analytics natively supports the same rich, flexible-schema document data model used in Couchbase Server, rather than trying to force your data into an RDBMS model.
- Workload isolation: Operational query latency and throughput are protected from slow downs due to analytical query workload - without the complexity of operating a separate analytical database.
- High data freshness: Couchbase Analytics uses DCP, a fast memory-to-memory protocol that Couchbase Server nodes are used to synchronize the data among themselves. Because of this, analytics run on the data that’s extremely current, without hassles or delays.
Couchbase Analytics has been programmed using the SQL++ query language, which is the upcoming declarative query language. SQL++ has loads in common with SQL, however at the same time, it goes on to include a small number of extensions which addresses the different data models which the two languages has been designed to serve.