September 2020 Summaries

Facet Digital, a full-service agency specializing in application development, transitioned to Couchbase Cloud from Azure Cosmos DB due to significant cost savings and enhanced performance benefits. Co-founders Scott W. Bradley and Jeremy Groh noted that Couchbase Cloud offers superior latency, throughput, and search capabilities, which are pivotal for their diverse projects, ranging from pharmaceutical systems to 3D gaming platforms. The ease of deploying new clusters and the built-in security features, such as encryption and compliance with global data privacy laws, were also highlighted as key advantages. The ability to manage Couchbase within the client's AWS environment while retaining control over proprietary data further solidified Couchbase Cloud as the ideal solution for Facet Digital's needs.

Couchbase provides multiple methods for authentication and authorization to its N1QL query service, including credentials passed through REST requests, basic authentication, and X.509 certificates for enhanced encryption and server authentication. The article details the setup of X.509 certificates, which involve a hierarchical public key infrastructure (PKI) with root, intermediate, and node certificates, to ensure secure communication between clients and servers. It explains the process of generating these certificates using OpenSSL and stresses the importance of a validated certificate chain to establish trust. The guide also highlights the implementation of X.509 certificates within Couchbase clusters, emphasizing the necessary steps and considerations for deploying certificates on servers to maintain secure client-server communication. Additionally, it underlines the use of certificates in N1QL queries and via the cbq shell, ensuring secure data transfers in compliance with required standards.

Couchbase has announced the general availability of the Couchbase Ruby SDK 3.0, designed to connect Ruby applications to Couchbase clusters with a high-performance API that extends native Ruby capabilities. This SDK supports future server features like Scopes and Collections and is compatible with Ruby versions 2.5.0 and above, as well as Couchbase server versions 6.0.0 and above. Installation is straightforward, involving a simple gem installation process, and it offers precompiled extensions for systems without a C/C++ compiler. Key features include Key Value operations for document management, Sub-Document operations for efficient data access, N1QL language-based querying for document retrieval, and an analytics service for complex ad-hoc queries on JSON data. The SDK aims to simplify application development with enhanced features and invites developers to engage with the community for feedback and support.

Couchbase databases, while initially configured correctly, often require health checks over time due to changes in workload and dataset growth, which can lead to issues such as high resource utilization, slow response times, and poor user experiences. To address these challenges, Couchbase offers health check services through its CoE (Center of Excellence) Professional Services, providing both basic and comprehensive reports that assess cluster health and offer recommendations for improvement. Conducting regular health checks enables better performance tuning, capacity planning, and reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO), as well as ensuring compliance with security policies. The health check process involves analyzing a mix of operational data, server logs, and configurations to identify and rectify underlying issues, with best practices such as ensuring complete data collection and reviewing historical growth patterns to enhance effectiveness. Following up on recommendations and scheduling subsequent checks are also advised to monitor improvements and maintain optimal cluster health.

The use of geospatial features has significantly increased user engagement, with many applications now relying on location-based recommendations. However, traditional radius-based queries can lead to imprecise results, highlighting the need for more precise search methods like polygon-based searches. Geospatial geometry/polygon search allows users to look for documents within a closed polygon-shaped object defined by coordinates, enabling more accurate and targeted searches in various use cases such as real estate, gaming, analytics, advertising, and smart cities. The popularity of geospatial searches has grown over the years, with 95% of apps in China requesting access to user locations. Creating geospatial indexes is a crucial step in utilizing polygon-based searches, which can be achieved using Couchbase's Full-Text Search (FTS) REST API or native SDKs. The search query format allows users to specify coordinates and polygons using the `polygon_points` attribute, enabling precise filtering of documents based on location. Geospatial ring/donut shaped search can also be used to filter specific areas out by specifying inner polygon coordinates within a boolean query's "must_not" block.