October 15, 2015

Couchbase 4.0 and related subjects

I last wrote about Couchbase in November, 2012, around the time of Couchbase 2.0. One of the many new features I mentioned then was secondary indexing. Ravi Mayuram just checked in to tell me about Couchbase 4.0. One of the important new features he mentioned was what I think he said was Couchbase’s “first version” of secondary indexing. Obviously, I’m confused.

Now that you’re duly warned, let me remind you of aspects of Couchbase timeline.

Technical notes on Couchbase 4.0 — and related riffs 🙂 — start:

Up to a point, SQL-on-NoSQL stories can be fairly straightforward.

For example, I think that’s the idea behind most ODBC/JDBC drivers for NoSQL systems. I think it’s also the idea behind most “SQL-like” languages that NoSQL vendors ship.

*Nobody I talk to about this ever wants to call it a “view”, but it sure sounds like a view to me — not a materialized view, of course, but a view nonetheless.

JOIN syntax can actually be straightforward as well under these assumptions. As for JOIN execution, Couchbase pulls all the data into the relevant tier, and nested loop execution there. My new clients at SequoiaDB have a similar strategy, by the way, although in their case there’s a hash join option as well.

But if things stopped there, they would miss an important complication: NoSQL has nested data. I.e., a value can actually be an array, whose entries are arrays themselves, and so on. That said, the “turtles all the way down” joke doesn’t quite apply, because at some point there are actual scalar or string values, and those are the ones SQL wants to actually operate on.

Most approaches I know of to that problem boil down to identifying particular fields as table columns, with or without aliases/renaming; I think that’s the old Hadapt/Vertica strategy, for example. Couchbase claims to be doing something a little different however, with a SQL-extending operator called UNNEST. Truth be told, I’m finding the N1QL language reference a bit terse, and haven’t figured out what the practical differences vs. the usual approach are, if any. But it sounds like there may be some interesting ideas in there somewhere.

Comments

One Response to “Couchbase 4.0 and related subjects”

  1. clive boulton on October 15th, 2015 3:25 pm

    SQL-on-NoSQL seems to be the pattern emerging to for frugal multitenancy. Perhaps the long awaited basis for new ERP platforms?

    – Apache Phoenix (Salesforce.com)
    – Microsoft online business apps (dogfooding Azure to replace the NET 4.5.2 SQL server stack for Office 360).
    – Google’s MT BigTable progress (gets contributed back to HBase?).
    – GraphX on Spark (API for Pregel abstraction).

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