ext/memcached is a popular PHP extension for memcached. You can use Couchbase Server in places where you use memcached today and take advantage of Couchbase Server's unique features like scaling over multiple physical machines, persistence or view querying (2.0 or later) as well as many others.

This section will explain how to migrate an existing codebase from ext/memcached to ext/couchbase.

ext/couchbase is our new PHP extension around libcouchbase, our also new C-library for connecting to Couchbase Server. ext/couchbase is mostly API compatible with ext/memcached. However, we made a few changes to take advantage of libcouchbase's unique features.

You can use ext/memcached with Couchbase Server just fine (using the binary protocol), so why would you want to migrate to ext/couchbase?

Easy! ext/memcached is what we call a “dumb-client” while ext/couchbase is a “smart client”. This isn’t meant to sound any derogatory, of course, but points to the fact that with memcached you always have a single server to connect to or you are manually managing multiple ones. Couchbase server can manage multiple servers for you, so you still only connect to one physical node, but ext/couchbase is “smart” enough to figure out which server to talk to for a given operation.

And like we said earlier, you get first class access to all the other features Couchbase has over memcached. We hope that is all reason enough to migrate. Now let’s go.