Couchbase Server stores all of your application data in either RAM or on disk. The data containers used in Couchbase Server are called buckets; there are two bucket types in Couchbase, which reflect the two types of data storage that we use in Couchbase Server. Buckets also serve as namespaces for documents and are used to look up a document by key:

• Couchbase Buckets: provide data persistence and data replication. Data stored in Couchbase Buckets is highly-available and reconfigurable without server downtime. They can survive node failures and restore data plus allow cluster reconfiguration while still fulfilling service requests. The main features are:

  • Supports items up to 20MB in size.

  • Persistence, including data sets that are larger than the allocated memory size for a bucket. You can configure persistence per bucket and Couchbase Server will persist data asynchronously from RAM to disk.

  • Fully supports replication and server rebalancing. You can configure one or more replica servers for a Couchbase bucket. If a node fails, a replica node can be promoted to be the host node.

  • Full range of statistics supported.

• Memcached Buckets: provides in-memory document storage. Memcache buckets cache frequently-used data in memory, thereby reducing the number of queries a database server must perform in response to web application requests. Memcached buckets can work alongside relational database technology, not only NoSQL databases.

  • Item size limited to 1 MByte.

  • No persistence.

  • No replication; no rebalancing.

  • Statistics about Memcached Buckets are on RAM usage and client-side operations.

You can customize the properties of each bucket, within limits using Couchbase Admin Console, Couchbase Command Line Interface (CLI), or the Couchbase REST Admin API. Quotas for RAM and disk space can be configured per bucket so you can manage usage across a cluster. For more detailed information about buckets, See Section 11.6 of the Couchbase Manual.

Couchbase Server is best suited for fast-changing data items of relatively small size. For in-memory storage, using Couchbase Memcached buckets, the memcached standard 1 megabyte limit applies to each value. Items suitable for storage include shopping carts, user profile, user sessions, time lines, game states, pages, conversations and product catalog. Items that are less suitable include large audio or video media files.

Couchbase buckets can store any binary bytes, and the encoding is dependent on your chosen Couchbase SDK. Some SDKs offer convenience functions to serialize/de-serialize objects from your favorite web application programming language to a blob for storage. Please consult your client library API documentation for details.

On that note, some Couchbase SDKs offer the additional feature of optionally compressing/decompressing objects stored into Couchbase. The CPU-time versus space trade-off here should be considered, in addition to how you might want to version objects under changing encoding schemes. For example, you might consider using the flags field in each item to denote the encoding kind or optional compression. When starting your application development, a useful mantra to follow is to keep things simple. For more information, please consult the Language Reference for your chosen SDK.