Simple

Couchbase Server is easy to install and manage, and through the document nature and memcached protocol interface, an easy to use database system. Because the database uses the document structure you do not need to create or manage the databases, tables and schemas. The simplified structure also means that the information can be distributed across nodes in a Couchbase Cluster automatically, without having to worry about normalizing or sharding your data to scale out performance.

Fast

Couchbase Server is fast, primarily because of the in-memory nature of the database. Furthermore, Couchbase Server provides quasi-deterministic latency and throughput, meaning that you can predict and rely on the speed and performance of your database without having to prepare and cope for spikes in load and problems.

Elastic

Couchbase Server was built from the core with the ability to expand and distribute the load across multiple servers. This is achieved through a combination of intelligence built into the server for distributing the stored data, and complimentary intelligence for clients accessing the data to be directed to the right machine. Data is automatically redistributed across the cluster, and changing the capacity of the cluster is a case of adding or removing nodes and rebalancing the cluster.

In tandem with the elastic nature of Couchbase Server, a Couchbase Cluster also takes advantage of the clustered architecture to support high availability. All nodes in a cluster are identical, and the cluster automatically creates replicas of information across the cluster. If a node fails, the stored data will be available on another node in the cluster.

memcached Compatibility

memcached is an memory-based caching application that uses the notion of a document store to save important data that are required by applications directly in RAM. Because the information is stored entirely in RAM, the latency for storing and retrieving information is very low. As a caching solution, memcached is used by a wide range of companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia to help speed up their web-application performance by acting as a storage location for objects retrieved at comparative expense from a traditional SQL database.

Couchbase Server supports the same client protocol used by memcached for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting information in the database. This enables Couchbase Server to be a drop-in replacement for memcached, and this means that applications already employing memcached can take advantage of the other functionality within Couchbase Server, such as clustered and elastic distribution.