Overall Satisfaction with Couchbase Data Platform
CenterEdge Software has been using Couchbase for a variety of use cases for many years. We started as simple query cache in 2012, then moved to shopping cart persistence, and now it's our primary database for our cloud-based products. Couchbase provides an easy to use but powerful platform that is very scalable, highly available, and performant. This allows us to design an application that we can be confident will scale to handle all of our customers' needs as we continue to onboard accounts. The ability to avoid downtime to perform scaling is particularly important since our customers are distributed around the globe.
- Scalability - As our needs grow we can scale horizontally, taking advantage of autosharding. This is much less cumbersome than dealing with manual partitioning in RDBMS systems.
- Availability - Automatic replication and failover within the cluster means we have no downtime, even if a node fails. It also means that we can scale up or perform database upgrades with zero down time.
- Agility - The schemaless nature of Couchbase allows us to continuously deploy new application versions that add additional data to records, without the overhead and complexity of using DDL to alter table schemas.
- Query Optimization - While the SQL-based query language is very robust and powerful, the automatic query optimization isn't as mature as RDBMS platforms. This requires a bit more attention to indexing and index hints.
- Management UI - The management UI is much better than most other NoSQL platforms, but the need to connect to different nodes in the cluster depending on which function you are performing (FTS queries, N1QL queries, view management) can be a minor frustration.
- Index Replica Management - The process for managing index replicas for high availability is not yet a streamlined as the other services, and can require some manual maintenance.
- N1QL's SQL-like syntax has made bringing new developers up to speed both easy and inexpensive.
- The schema-less approach to data store has increased agility.
- Operating at scale, Couchbase tends to be less expensive than major RDBMS solutions, especially once you implement high availability in RDBMS.
I found the Couchbase provided a more robust solution that was easier to use and develop against. DynamoDB is limited to Amazon, which would reduce our cloud provider flexibility in the future. MongoDB has great read performance, but write performance doesn't scale as well, which was a detriment to our OLTP use cases. Perhaps most importantly, the N1QL query language is by far the most powerful and the easiest to use amongst all NoSQL solutions I've investigated.