We’re excited to pull back the curtain on the beta release of Couchbase Server 5.0. With this release, Couchbase provides the world’s first Engagement Database, built on the most powerful NoSQL technology. This platform delivers unparalleled performance at any scale, while providing unmatched agility and manageability.

To meet the requirements of an Engagement Database, this beta release comes with new key capabilities that further strengthen our core characteristics of agility, performance, and manageability.

  1. Full-text search
  2. Powerful indexing & querying
  3. Secure platform
  4. Performance, scalability, and high-availability
  5. Enhanced management, developer tools
  6. Big data connectors

With these additions and much more, Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta is a huge release that packs a massive punch for enterprises looking to transform their digital business.

Download Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta 

What’s new in 5.0 Beta?

Let’s dive right in!

Full-text Search – built right in

Need to enable flexible and powerful Search capabilities? No digital application is complete without search. With 5.0, Couchbase search is becoming an integral part of the scalable data platform. Full-text search (FTS) provides the ability to index Couchbase documents and query them rapidly using a variety of indexing methods, text analyzers, and languages – without leaving the Couchbase Data Platform and without duplicating any data. The search index gets in-memory updates as the data changes. To learn more about FTS, see Full-text search reference.

Secure Platform

For digital applications, being compliant is not just nice-to-have, but a must-have. Built on the role-based access control (RBAC) security model from 4.5, RBAC for applications in 5.0 Beta allows you to segregate access and closely align user roles in Couchbase with the actual roles they hold within your organization. This allows your application services and users to access the information they need – nothing more, nothing less.

The bottom line is that with RBAC for applications you are now closer to meeting your security compliance requirements. To learn more, read about RBAC in our documentation.

Powerful indexing, querying, and search

Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta adds a unique new way to provide ad hoc search queries through N1QL. Adaptive indexes can efficiently look up any of the indexed fields – without requiring you to create multiple composite indexes or different index key combinations! For more information, read about adaptive indexes in our documentation.

Want to identify a long-running query and tune your query performance? With Couchbase Server 5.0, you get a detailed visual query plan with execution timing and other query monitoring statistics that provide detailed insights into the query execution process. Check our documentation to learn how you can monitor your N1QL queries.

Want to join external data with the data stored in Couchbase? Whether it’s social data, map data, or any other JSON data on the web, now there’s a way with N1QL CURL to interact with it, and integrate to build powerful applications. Check our documentation to learn more about N1QL CURL.

Performance, scalability, and high availability

From the very beginning, performance has been one of the key reasons why enterprises have chosen Couchbase for mission-critical applications. With 5.0 Beta we have continued to push the boundaries even further to provide you with unparalleled performance at any scale!

Want better performance at a much lower cost? Now, with the new ephemeral buckets feature in Couchbase 5.0 Beta, you can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating the disk component for your Couchbase buckets, and get highly consistent in-memory performance without disk-based fluctuations. For more information, see here.

For a mission-critical Engagement Database, robust failure detection and recovery are key. The new fast-failover feature in Couchbase 5.0 Beta provides a robust failure detection mechanism to reduce the time window of a failure detection from 30 seconds to less than 10 seconds. This means, increased 9’s of availability for your application. For more information, see here.

With Couchbase 5.0 Beta, you can not only create indexes to speed up and scale queries to a new level, but also enjoy better index availability and manageability. Just specify the number of index replicas to create, and the system will dynamically manage the placements of the index replicas across different nodes, server groups, and availability zones. Couchbase Server 5.0 also brings support for rebalancing indexes without any system downtime. For more information, see here.

5.0 Beta also adds several other N1QL performance enhancements. Some of the notable ones are:

  1. Indexing and querying on meta() fields
  2. Complex predicate pushdowns
  3. Pagination pushdowns 
  4. Operator pushdown

Enhanced management & developer tools

When you launch Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta, you will notice a modern web console interface that is engineered for intelligence, comfort, and speed. This redesigned interface offers a new look and streamlines your common tasks and workflows.

 

Find it hard to read JSON or text-based N1QL query plans? 5.0 Beta has the answer – he visual query plan feature has arrived!

The visual query plan feature provides a graphical representation of the query execution process as data flows visually from one query operator to another, highlighting the most expensive operations.

You can also use query monitoring to see currently active queries and how long they’ve been running, to view the longest running completed queries, and see statistics on the execution of prepared queries.


For building applications with Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta as fast as possible we have updated our SDKs to support many of the new critical features you’ve seen above – including RBAC, fast failover, ephemeral buckets, and full-text search. We’ve also introduced many other language-specific improvements, as well as improved integration with Spring Data and .NET Core support. For more information, check out the release notes of each language.  

Couchbase 5.0 Beta also provides integrations with Spark 2.1, and a developer preview connector for Talend Open Studio 6.3.1.

Dig deeper!

We have just scratched the surface of Couchbase Server 5.0 with the capabilities mentioned above and there are many more. Our new 5.0 documentation will help you to dig deeper.

OK! How do I get my hands on 5.0 beta?

Remember this before you take the plunge:

This is a beta version of Couchbase Server 5.0 and is intended for development purposes only.

To use 5.0 Beta, you need to do a fresh install. This release is not supported in production.

We consider beta releases to have some rough edges and bugs.

Overall, the release is still under active development, which means that
you can have a big impact on the final version of the product by providing feedback and observations.

It is easy to get your hands on the beta:

  1. Download Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta from our download page.
  2. Looking to develop in Java, .Net, Node.js, PHP, or other languages with native SDKs? Download the latest SDK version under the “client libraries” section on the downloads page.
  3. Don’t forget to check out our 5.0 Beta release notes.

Finally, good luck building your applications with Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta, and we look forward to your valuable feedback.

Author

Posted by Don Pinto, Principal Product Manager, Couchbase

Don Pinto is a Principal Product Manager at Couchbase and is currently focused on advancing the capabilities of Couchbase Server. He is extremely passionate about data technology, and in the past has authored several articles on Couchbase Server including technical blogs and white papers. Prior to joining Couchbase, Don spent several years at IBM where he maintained the role of software developer in the DB2 information management group and most recently as a program manager on the SQL Server team at Microsoft. Don holds a master's degree in computer science and a bachelor's in computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada.

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