Developing with Couchbase Server: Building Scalable, Flexible Database-Based Applications

by MC Brown

Overview

Today’s highly interactive websites pose a challenge for traditional SQL databases—the ability to scale rapidly and serve loads of concurrent users. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to build web applications on top of Couchbase Server 2.0, a NoSQL database that can handle websites and social media where hundreds of thousands of users read and write large volumes of information.

Using food recipe information as examples, this book demonstrates how to take advantage of Couchbase’s document-oriented database design, and how to store and query data with various CRUD operations. Discover why Couchbase is better than SQL databases with memcached tiers for managing data from the most interactive portions of your application.

• Learn about Couchbase Server’s cluster-based architecture and how it differs from SQL databases
• Choose a client library for Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, PHP, or C, and connect to a cluster
• Structure data in a variety of formats, from serialized objects, a stream of raw bytes, or as JSON documents
• Learn core storage and retrieval methods, including document IDs, expiry times, and concurrent updates
• Create views with map/reduce and learn Couchbase mechanisms for querying and selection

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449331160
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/14/2013
Pages:	85
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

A professional writer for over 15 years, Martin 'MC' Brown is the author and contributor to over 26 books covering an array of topics, including programming, system management and web technologies. His expertise spans myriad development languages and platforms – Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Rebol, Gawk, Shellscript, Windows, Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Microsoft WP, Mac OS and more. The combination has resulted in expertise in web programming, systems management and integration, and XML and DocBook technologies for writing and publishing documentation. A former LAMP Technologies Editor for LinuxWorld magazine and is a regular contributor to ServerWatch.com, LinuxPlanet, ComputerWorld and IBM developerWorks. As a Subject Matter Expert for Microsoft he provided technical input to their Windows Server and certification teams. He draws on a rich and varied background as founder member of a leading UK ISP, systems manager and IT consultant for an advertising agency and Internet solutions group, technical specialist for an intercontinental ISP network, and database designer and programmer – and as a self-confessed compulsive consumer of computing hardware and software. In his pre-writing life he spent more than 10 years designing and managing mixed platform environments. As a result he has developed a rare talent of being able to convey the benefits and intricacies of his subject with equal measures of enthusiasm, professionalism, in-depth knowledge and insight. A past technical writer building both the documentation system and writing content for MySQL and the MySQL groups within Sun and then Oracle. MC is currently the VP of Documentation for Couchbase and is responsible for all published documentation, training programme and content, and the the Couchbase Techzone.

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction; Where to Get Help on Couchbase Server; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Couchbase Overview; 1.1 Architecture and Structure; 1.2 Buckets and vBuckets; 1.3 Data Storage and Retrieval; 1.4 Views, Indexes, and Querying; 1.5 Comparing Couchbase to SQL Databases; 1.6 Use Cases; Chapter 2: Getting Started; 2.1 Installing Couchbase Server; 2.2 Couchbase Client Libraries; 2.3 Buckets; 2.4 Connecting to a Cluster; Chapter 3: Document-based Database Design; 3.1 JSON Overview; 3.2 Modeling Recipe Data; 3.3 Related Data; Chapter 4: Getting Data In and Out; 4.1 Basic Interface; 4.2 Document Identifiers; 4.3 Time to Live (TTL); 4.4 Storing Data; 4.5 Retrieving Data; 4.6 Updating Data; 4.7 Concurrent Updates; 4.8 Server-side Updates; 4.9 Asynchronous Operations; 4.10 Pessimistic Locking; 4.11 Deleting Data; Chapter 5: Storing and Updating Recipes; 5.1 Initial Storage; 5.2 Editing; 5.3 Loading Recipe; 5.4 Storing Related Data; 5.5 Loading Related Data; 5.6 Documents Aren’t Everything; Chapter 6: Views and Queries; 6.1 Creating Views on Your Data; 6.2 Accessing Views from a Client Library; 6.3 Querying and Selection; 6.4 Other Options; 6.5 Dealing with Different Document Formats; 6.6 View Values and Reduction; 6.7 Index Updates; 6.8 Searching and Querying Examples; 6.9 Reductions; 6.10 Document Metadata; Chapter 7: Next Steps; 7.1 Couchbase Server Resources; 7.2 Couchbase Developer Resources; Colophon;