If you are new to Capella, it is our cloud database platform that serves the needs of modern applications. How does it do this? At its core is a multimodel and distributed document database that is designed for high-speed performance and secure replication.
Our customers apply Capella across many industries and use cases, with some of the most popular including user profiles, product catalogs, high-speed caching and advanced mobile field services.
We put together a video presenting Couchbase Capella and key benefits. Here are ten reasons you’ll love Capella too.
A Blazing-fast Built-in Cache
Capella’s in-memory architecture is not only great for caching but also for moving data between nodes and clusters. Data operations occur at sub-millisecond speeds, helping ensure application performance. In fact, in a recent blog post by LinkedIn’s engineering team, they shared how migrating to Couchbase’s caching technology helps them meet high volume interactions (up to 5 million profiles served per second) while also lowering latency and cost.
Our customers are not the only ones recognizing the performance achievements of Capella. Compared to other top NoSQL databases, Capella delivers the best read/write speeds for clusters of various sizes, e.g., from 3 up to 18 nodes. Read the third party benchmark analysis report, here is a chart comparing Capella and others:
Flexible JSON Documents and Schema
JSON-based data models and documents allow unprecedented flexibility for developers using Capella, allowing data schemas to effortlessly stay in sync with object models. Because rigid relational database schemas are not required, developers are able to decide how to model and manage their data.
Need more features as your application evolves? Capella lets you add new features as needed, reducing the time to market for your application.
Easy to Query Data via SQL++
Moving to JSON does not mean you have to learn a complex new query language, instead, you can use SQL++ that gently extends SQL for use with JSON. Capella supports sophisticated syntax like JOINs and sub-queries but also provides innovative access to features like nested objects, arrays and even ACID transactions – there is no compromise with data interaction capabilities just because you’ve moved to a NoSQL database.
We are also taking queries one step further by introducing Capella iQ, a built-in AI co-pilot that helps automate the generation of SQL queries, sample data and other Capella-related code snippets using natural language prompts that are intuitive and context-aware.
Integrated Text Search Capabilities
Capella meets the demand for built-in Google-like search and discovery within the database by including full-text search capabilities – no additional license or integration products are required. See the example in the video where I show a quick text search index and search results without leaving the database or installing third-party support.
Powerful SDK and IDE Integrations
Providing tools for developers to build applications on Capella is essential for us. That’s why you can use our SDKs across more than a dozen different programming languages. The SDKs cover the breadth of Capella’s capabilities without needing add-ons or integrations for services such as key-value interaction, SQL++ querying, full-text search and analytics. We’ve also built the intelligence of the SDK into several IDEs and tools including JetBrains, VS Code, Netlify, Vercel, and more – one more way we support our users.
Big data integrations are still important, that is why we have developed further connectors and support for platforms like Kafka and Spark.
App Services for Mobile Developers
When we talk about modern applications, we naturally expect our users to need mobile and embedded database support, even in environments with unstable network access. Capella App Services delivers sophisticated data sync functionality out of the box. Leveraging a local embedded database allows apps to work without the Internet, yet save changes until the next time synchronization is possible. Applications can also use peer-to-peer sync features for maintaining distributed data while also offline.
Mobile is not a new feature or a secondary capability of Couchbase offerings, having been around for a decade. Common sense options like document filters and delta sync give developers the ability to streamline and optimize data flow across databases and sync environments.
Broad Security and Compliance Support
As do-it-yourself security is not an option in today’s critical data landscape, protecting your data is critical. Couchbase has worked for over a decade with industry leaders to implement the highest levels of data security and related compliance.
For example, Capella provides broad capabilities such as end-to-end encryption (from apps all the way to storage) all the way down to fine-grained/granular role-based access control. The Capella security and data protection approaches are laid out in our Trust Center and related whitepaper.
But Wait, There’s More!
All of the above powerful tools and capabilities are built into your Capella experience from Day 1, including during your Capella free trial. Evolving from our free trial to a full developer experience is as easy as picking up a Capella Starter Kit. These are available through major cloud marketplaces and give you cloud credits at a 60% discount.
Once activated, your full Capella experience gets even better, including the following additional features.
Access to More Features
If you haven’t noticed already, Capella provides much more than just key-value access or SQL-based queries and can deliver them using their own storage and processing capabilities to isolate workloads.
For example, the Eventing Service provides high performance user-defined business logic that can be triggered in real-time when applications create data changes. It can greatly streamline your data-driven business workflows by working directly on your data stream.
This video uses Eventing Services to create 100 million sample documents in under 3 minutes, leveraging the power of our in-memory architecture!
Likewise, Capella not only enables real-time analytics for your data, but allows you to analyze your data without affecting operational workloads by running as a service in parallel to other data and query services. Our massively parallel processing engine uses SQL for queries and delivers stellar results through cost-based optimization.
Automatic Active-Active Replication and High Availability
When you are done with your trial and ready to roll out true high availability and active-active replication, we have you covered.
Capella stands out from the competition by keeping every node “active”, allowing read and write to all nodes, unlike MongoDB’s architecture that limits scalability by imposing an inefficient primary/secondary hierarchy.
Data in Capella is automatically partitioned and replicated across nodes, keeping data evenly distributed and also strongly consistent. In fact, SDKs help optimize applications by knowing the fastest route to all data in the cluster. Likewise, if a node ever goes down, the system is ready and able to automatically failover and restore your data from a replica set, helping to prevent any single point of failure.
Not only do nodes benefit from in-memory replication but cross data center replication is also available, further increasing Capella’s high availability options.
Ease of Administration
And, it’s easy to use. Whether managing a single database or multiple clusters across multiple regions and cloud providers, Capella makes it easy to set up and manage your databases in a single web-based management pane.
Capella automates deployment and maintenance, for example, you can set up a Capella with a single click: spin up the infrastructure, set up software, apply security – done! Couchbase can then manage the upgrades and security patches for you.
Need to streamline Capella even more? Leverage orchestration frameworks like Terraform or build on our built-in admin API.
We also help you dramatically reduce your cloud costs by providing a hibernation feature that lets you schedule shutdown (or initiate it manually) when your database is not being used, e.g., during development/testing.
Automated alerts and support for SRE and cloud teams are part of ongoing monitoring that Capella provides, letting you know when action is needed.
And finally, you will love the multidimensional scaling that puts Capella far ahead of the competition. Just as deployment architectures and service usage can vary greatly depending on application use cases, so does Capella help you shrink and grow your usage of hardware resources. Need more memory or storage for a particular part of the cluster, Capella will help you set up and align your needs across nodes and services, making the overall system more performant, efficient, and cost-effective.
Next Steps
I hope you enjoyed this brief run-through of Capella’s top ten benefits, here are some of the links we touched on so you can continue learning.
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- Start today with our Capella Free Trial.
- Capella Starter Kit – available in cloud marketplaces: AWS – GCP – Azure
- LinkedIn’s Couchbase caching use case blog post
- Couchbase Capella Trust Center
- Third-party benchmark by Altoros (Sponsored by Couchbase)
- Couchbase Capella video overviews and demos: