Data storage
Couchbase Server provides data management services using buckets. Buckets are isolated virtual containers for data. A bucket is a logical grouping of physical resources within a cluster of Couchbase Servers.
Buckets provide a secure mechanism for organizing, managing, and analyzing data storage resources. Two types of data buckets, memcached and couchbase, enable you to store data either in-memory only or both in-memory and on disk (for added reliability). During Couchbase Server set up, the type of bucket that you need for your implementation is selected.
| Bucket Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Couchbase | Provides highly-available and dynamically reconfigurable distributed data storage, providing persistence and replication services. Couchbase buckets are 100% protocol compatible with, and built in the spirit of, the memcached open source distributed key-value cache. |
| Memcached | Provides a directly-addressed, distributed (scale-out), in-memory, key-value cache. Memcached buckets are designed to be used alongside relational database technology – caching frequently-used data, thereby reducing the number of queries a database server must perform for web servers delivering a web application. |
The different bucket types support different capabilities.
| Capability | memcached Buckets | Couchbase Buckets |
|---|---|---|
| Item Size Limit | 1 MByte | 20 MByte |
| Persistence | No | Yes |
| Replication | No | Yes |
| Rebalance | No | Yes |
| Statistics | Limited set for in-memory stats | Full suite |
| Client Support | Memcached, should use Ketama consistent hashing | Full Smart Client Support |
| XDCR | No | Yes |
| Backup | No | Yes |
| Tap/DCP | No | Yes |
| Encrypted Data Access | No | Yes |
Couchbase-type buckets provide a highly-available and dynamically reconfigurable distributed data store, survive node failures, and allow cluster reconfiguration while continuing to service requests. Couchbase-type buckets provide the following core capabilities:
| Couchbase bucket capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Caching | Couchbase buckets operate through RAM. Data is kept in RAM and persisted down to disk. Data will be cached in RAM until the configured RAM is exhausted, when data is ejected from RAM. If requested data is not currently in the RAM cache, it will be loaded automatically from disk. |
| Persistence | Data objects can be persisted asynchronously to hard-disk resources from memory to provide protection from server restarts or minor failures. Persistence properties are set at the bucket level. |
| Replication | A configurable number of replica servers can receive copies of all data objects in the Couchbase-type bucket. If the host machine fails, a replica server can be promoted to be the host server, providing high availability cluster operations via failover. Replication is configured at the bucket level. |
| Rebalancing | Rebalancing enables load distribution across resources and dynamic addition or removal of buckets and servers in the cluster. |
The following bucket interface types that can be configured. Both memcached or Couchbase buckets can be authenticated via SASL or not authenticated (non-SASL).
- Default bucket
- The default bucket is a Couchbase bucket that always resides on port 11211 and is a non-SASL authenticating bucket. When Couchbase Server is first installed this bucket is automatically set up during installation. This bucket can be removed after installation and can also be re-added later, but when re-adding a bucket named “default”, the bucket must be place on port 11211 and must be a non-SASL authenticating bucket. A bucket not named default cannot reside on port 11211 if it is a non-SASL bucket. The default bucket can be reached with a vBucket aware smart client, an ASCII client or a binary client that doesn’t use SASL authentication.
- Non-SASL buckets
- Non-SASL buckets can be placed on any available port with the exception of port 11211 if the bucket is not named “default”. Only one Non-SASL bucket can placed on any individual port. These buckets can be reached with a vBucket aware smart client, an ASCII client or a binary client that doesn’t use SASL authentication.
- SASL buckets
- SASL authenticating Couchbase buckets can only be placed on port 11211 and each bucket is
differentiated by its name and password. SASL bucket cannot be placed on any
other port beside 11211. These buckets can be reached with either a vBucket
aware smart client or a binary client that has SASL support. These buckets
cannot be reached with ASCII clients.
Smart clients discover changes in the cluster using the Couchbase Management REST API. Buckets can be used to isolate individual applications to provide multi-tenancy or to isolate data types in the cache to enhance performance and visibility. Couchbase Server permits you to configure different ports to access different buckets, and provides the option to access isolated buckets using either the binary protocol with SASL authentication or the ASCII protocol with no authentication
Couchbase Server permits you to use and mix different types of buckets, Couchbase and Memcached, in your environment. Buckets of different types still share the same resource pool and cluster resources. Quotas for RAM and disk usage are configurable per bucket so that resource usage can be managed across the cluster. Quotas can be modified on a running cluster so that administrators can reallocate resources as usage patterns or priorities change over time.