May 2014 Summaries

Couchbase has released its mobile application development solution, Couchbase Mobile 1.0, which provides a NoSQL platform for building always available and responsive mobile applications. The solution includes a full-featured embedded database, Sync Gateway for synchronization with the server, and Couchbase Server for scalability. This release is the culmination of nearly three years of work, with significant improvements in performance, feature set, and community engagement. The solution supports iOS, Android, and other platforms, providing native and REST client support, as well as libraries for CRUD operations and conflict resolution. With its stateless no-shared architecture sync server tier, Couchbase Mobile enables quick scaling and easily configurable custom syncing capabilities.

Couchbase is a distributed, high-performance Cache and NoSQL database that requires effective monitoring to ensure successful deployment, especially in mission-critical and distributed computing environments. Monitoring Couchbase involves tracking both the cluster as a whole and individual nodes to manage resource consumption and compute capacity, with key metrics including node state, system statistics, and Couchbase-specific data such as disk usage and memory consumption. The administration console, command line utilities, and REST API provide comprehensive monitoring capabilities that allow for the tracking of operations per second, cache miss rates, fragmentation, working sets, and disk drain among other statistics. These tools also help forecast the need for additional nodes and ensure adequate I/O resources to maintain application performance. Additionally, Couchbase's ability to persist data to disk while serving applications through its caching tier is a significant benefit, and understanding typical behavior in a given environment is crucial for identifying early warning signals of stress or potential issues. Monitoring practices should be tailored to each unique customer application to capture necessary additional metrics.