Get to know our Couchbase Community Meet Clinton van Blommestein

Meet the newest member of our Couchbase Champion team! Congratulations Welcome to Clinton Van Blommestein of Durban, South Africa. 

Cuéntanos sobre ti y qué haces en tu rol diario?

I am a senior software developer at a company called Derivco, and have been working here for just over 16 years. Day to day is mostly spent doing backend service and database development in C# or MS SQL.

¿Dónde tienes tu sede y qué te gusta hacer en tu tiempo libre?
I am based in Durban, South Africa. In my spare time I try to relax by doing as little as possible, and when I get bored of doing nothing I try to learn/experiment with a new technology.

¿Qué te hizo elegir Couchbase?
We needed a highly performance data store, and while there are many NoSQL offerings available, Couchbase is one of the few that offers strongly consistent document storage.

That feature, as well as N1QL, made it a solid choice.

¿Qué has logrado usando Couchbase?
Couchbase is used as the data store for player customizations, which is a core function for our business.

¿Qué característica de Couchbase usas y qué debería saber la gente al respecto?
We use most of the features from Couchbase, but if I had to single one out it would have to be N1QL. It allows us to do SQL queries over the data making it much more than just a document store.

Si pudieras pedir tres deseos para Couchbase, ¿cuáles serían?
1. For really complex N1QL queries it can take some effort to get the right index. It would be great if there was some sort of tool to assist with creating indexes to cover user-defined queries.

2. Have the ability to set up 2 clusters with synchronous XCDR, and if you get a node failure on the primary cluster the respective node in the secondary cluster takes over. This could reduce re-balance and downtime.

3. More operational information in the UI about a bucket. For example, the last time a backup (and type of backup) was taken.

¿Cuál es tu libro o autor favorito y por qué?
I can’t really single out anything in particular – I read a lot of technical books and whitepapers. However, “The Alchemist” from Paulo Coelho is one I go back to every once in awhile.