Couchbase, similar to Memcached, can store any binary bytes, and the encoding is up to you or your client library. Some memcached client libraries, for example, offer convenience functions to serialize/deserialize objects from your favorite web application programming language (Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc) to a blob for storage. Please consult your client library API documentation for details.

An additional consideration on object encoding/seralization is whether your objects will need to be handled by multiple programming languages. For example, it might be inconvenient for a Java client application to decode a serialized PHP object. In these cases, consider cross-language encodings such as JSON, XML, Google Protocol Buffers or Thrift.

The later two (Protocol Buffers and Thrift) have some advantages in providing more efficient object encodings than text-based encodings like JSON and XML. One key to Couchbase performance is to watch your working set size, so the more working set items you can fit into memory, the better.

On that note, some client libraries offer the additional feature of optionally compressing/decompressing objects stored into Couchbase. The CPU-time versus space tradeoff here should be considered, in addition to how you might want to version objects under changing encoding schemes. For example, you might consider using the 'flags' field in each item to denote the encoding kind and/or optional compression. When beginning application development, however, a useful mantra to follow is to just keep things simple.