Full-text search improvements in Couchbase Server 5.5 & 6.0

Couchbase Server 5.5 and 6.0 add several new features to the Pesquisa de Texto Completo (FTS) service (among many other new features). Included, are performance/manageability improvements, finalizing the geospatial feature, and adding extensive new language analyzers.

Indexing engine improvements

Foundational improvements were released as a developer preview with Couchbase Server 5.5 and will become production-ready with Couchbase Server 6.0. In particular, the new indexing engine (codename: Scorch) improves manageability in a couple ways.

The indexing time has been cut in half, allowing you to process up to 2x more data in the same amount of time. This is most important to users with high ingest or mutation rates.

Similarly, the index space on disk is profoundly improved. Data size has been decreased by up to 70%!  This allows you to store more than 3x additional data in the same space on disk.

We’ll share more details when the release is complete, but for now, try out the new feature through the index creation UI or by adjusting the index definition in JSON. See the highlighted options in the following  screenshot and see the documentation here.

Once you are running Couchbase Server 5.5 (or 6.0 beta), upgrade an old index by editing your index and choosing the newer type as shown below.  You should similar decrease in data size as shown in indexing the travel sample bucket below.

Couchbase language analyzers

Adding new language analyzers to FTS (in Couchbase Server 5.5) is one of the foundational ways we help bring Couchbase to the global market.  While English is the primary, supported, language analyzer, we have also focused on adding other languages from available open source libraries/projects.

Here is a full list of existing language analyzers with the new 11 languages highlighted.

Analyzer code	Language
ar	Arabic
cjk	Chinese | Japanese | Korean
ckb	Kurdish
da	Danish
de	German
en	English
es	Spanish (Castilian)
fa	Persian
fi	Finnish
fr	French
hi	Hindi
hu	Hungarian
it	Italian
nl	Dutch
não	Norwegian
pt	Portuguese
ro	Romanian
ru	Russian
sv	Swedish
tr	Turkish

Geospatial search in Couchbase

When we launched FTS in Couchbase Server 5.0 geospatial search capabilities were introduced as a developer preview feature.  We have now delivered it as a production quality feature in Couchbase Server 5.5.

Matthew Groves has an extensive example of building an application that uses geospatial search within a .NET project.  We have also updated the geospatial search documentation.

Conclusão

I hope you will agree that these improvements help meet even more of your enterprise use cases and help make the service even more manageable.

To get up to speed on Couchbase Full-text Search – and how to interact with it using the Couchbase SDK, REST API, and management console UI – please see the following:

• Introduction to Full-text Search – free online training course
• Fundamentals of Full-text Search – documentação
• Full-text Search SDK – documentação