Company
Date Published
Author
Murtadha Al Hubail, Principal Software Engineer, Couchbase
Word count
1117
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Typical ad-hoc analytical queries have to process much more data than can fit in memory, leading to I/O bound performance issues. The Analytics service in Couchbase 6.0 allows users to specify multiple "Analytics Disk Paths" during node initialization, enabling the partitioning of data across all specified paths in all nodes with the Analytics service. This feature can significantly speed up Analytics queries by utilizing modern storage devices like SSDs and concurrent reads. When a single "Analytics Disk Path" is specified, the Analytics service automatically creates multiple data partitions within the same storage device to optimize performance. Experiments have shown that this automatic configuration option can lead to substantial improvements in query response times, particularly when using high-performance storage devices like NVMe SSDs. By utilizing multiple physical disks and optimizing I/O operations, the Analytics engine can achieve significant performance gains, especially for large-scale data sets. The results demonstrate the importance of carefully configuring "Analytics Disk Paths" to maximize the performance impact of the Analytics service.