![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-30-at-12.36.48-am.png\")
Couchbase Mobile 1.2<\/h3>\nCouchbase Mobile 1.2<\/h3>\nThe <\/span>new release<\/a> of Couchbase Mobile 1.2, now available for <\/span>download<\/a>, delivers significant improvements around performance on the local client side storage engine for mobile devices. More specifically, the latest integration of ForestDB as the new storage engine designed to support various server and mobile operating systems.<\/span> On the server side,<\/span>Couchbase Server 4.1<\/a> completes the mobile story with<\/span>Sync Gateway 1.2<\/a> running in between the<\/span> Couchbase Lite 1.2<\/a> mobile client. <\/span>In this blog, I will explore ForestDB, examine the benefits, and share how developers can enable this feature in their apps.<\/span><\/p>\n What<\/span> ForestDB<\/a> provides for Couchbase Lite is a persistent key-value storage library where both the key and value mapping are binary blobs. ForestDB is a low-level key\/value storage engine, and in the same family as<\/span> Berkeley DB<\/a> and LevelDB<\/a>. As a developer you are able to get and set values accordingly as well as enumerate the keys in lexicographic order.<\/span><\/p>\n To better understand and find out more about the next generation storage engine for Couchbase, <\/span>view this presentation by<\/span> Chiyoung Seo <\/a> at the 2015 Couchbase Connect:<\/span><\/p>\n \n Here are some of the performance improvements of the new storage system for Couchbase Lite 1.2:<\/span><\/p>\n In previous versions, <\/span>SQLite<\/a> was the available storage engine for Coucbase Lite.<\/span> While SQLite currently emains the default, for Couchbase Mobile 1.2 there is an optional package in the Couchbase Lite project library to enable ForestDB.<\/span> The iOS and Android GrocerySync starter project with ForestDB components can be downloaded from<\/span> GitHub<\/a> on the specific branch.<\/p>\n Now I’m going to discuss how to enable <\/span>ForestDB inside our mobile application projects to take advantage of the new benefits. Note that if you have a previous project using an earlier version of Couchbase Lite then the existing database files are not converted. This is where a SQLite-backed database will continue <\/span>using SQLite by default because the format of the database type is established at the beginning of project creation. The existing database will always open with the same storage engine that created them.<\/span> Stay tuned for future blogs that will address how to migrate that over.<\/span><\/p>\n The Frameworks folder should now contain the CouchbaseLite.framework file. Next, drag in the libCBLForestDBStorage.a file so that both the green highlights are available in your Frameworks folder.<\/span><\/p>\n The system library libc++dylib needs to be linked and to do that we will go into the target’s “Build Phases” editor. Click on the ‘+’ symbol under the “Link Binary with Libraries” section and select the file of interest from ‘\/usr\/lib\/’ or simply type ‘c++’ into the filter field in the library chooser and ‘libc++’ will show up.<\/span><\/p>\n The file path may look similar to the following:<\/span><\/p>\n ForestDB is now available, but it isn\u2019t set as the default storage type, so new databases will still be created with SQLite. To change this, set the CBLManager instance\u2019s storageType property before opening any databases.\u00a0 For example, you might add the code outlined in green:<\/p>\n For the specific sample app project, navigate to your \u2018AppDelegate.m\u2019 file and under the \u2018createDatabase\u2019 method, specify the storageType property.\u00a0 But typically this depends on your app code’s structure and is usually in the application delegate class.\u00a0 Go to the place in your project or code where you instantiate the CBLManager class, and right afterwards add a line to set its storageType property, like so:<\/p>\n Now we are ready to build and run the application to have our mobile app use ForestDB as the storage engine.<\/span><\/p>\n Here are the steps required to enable the ForestDB store from within your Android project.<\/span><\/p>\n From within your Android project, the module level\u2019s build.gradle file would need to reference Couchbase Lite version 1.2 along with explicitly bringing in ForestDB as a storage engine at the dependency level. The dependencies would now include:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n And overall the build.gradle file should look like: You may reference the build.gradle<\/a> file from GitHub. \u00a0Now over in our \u2018MainActivity.java\u2019 file, what is new in Couchbase Lite 1.2 for Android is that there is now the \u2018DatabaseOptions\u2019 class where we specify the properties like \u2018.setStorageType\u2019.<\/p>\n To enable ForestDB in our Android application, we now need to pass in the ForestDB_Storage parameter to the \u2018setStorageType\u2019 function to switch the storage type from SQLite to ForestDB. \u00a0See below to learn how this is done:<\/span><\/p>\n Below in the GrocerySync sample app, we see where we reference the \u2018setStorageType\u2019 property from within the startCBLite() method:<\/span><\/p>\n So there you have it, Couchbase Mobile 1.2 comes with ForestDB as the new storage engine and we learned how to enable the feature from the default SQLite solution. We will explore Couchbase Mobile 1.2 further, including encryption and performance topics in follow-up blogs.<\/span>\u00a0 Be sure to download the new Couchbase Mobile 1.2<\/a> and connect with us in our Mobile Developer Forums<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Couchbase Mobile 1.2 The new release of Couchbase Mobile 1.2, now available for download, delivers significant improvements around performance on the local client side storage engine for mobile devices. More specifically, the latest integration of ForestDB as the new storage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":13873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2370,7667,1810,9410],"tags":[1536],"ppma_author":[8983],"class_list":["post-2154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-android","category-couchbase-lite","category-couchbase-mobile","category-objective-c","tag-ios"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nForestDB<\/h3>\n
Benefits<\/h3>\n
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Depending on the operation and data set involved, <\/span>there can be up to 5X improvement in speed, as well as,<\/span> better concurrency management where the writer never blocks the readers. Because data caches are shared between threads, we now see a lower RAM footprint. <\/span>This is complimented by automatic database compaction and background presence.<\/span> You can read more about<\/span> the ForestDB benchmarks and performance testing results by visiting Cihan Biyikoglu\u2019s <\/span> blog <\/a> on the next generation storage engine for Couchbase Server and Couchbase Lite.<\/span><\/h3>\n
Get Started<\/h3>\n
Enable ForestDB<\/h3>\n
iOS:<\/h4>\n
The following describes<\/span> the steps required to enable the ForestDB storage engine from within your iOS project. First move or copy the ‘CouchbaseLite.framework’ library file found from the<\/span> couchbase-lite-ios-enterprise_1.2.0-112<\/a> ZIP file into your iOS app project’s folder or into your iOS app project’s Frameworks subfolder. From there, drag the version 1.2 CouchbaseLite.framework into the project to avoid creating a reference in your project to some other filesystem path. This allows the framework to be available on all machines.<\/span><\/h4>\n
![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-28-at-2.45.17-pm.png\")
<\/p>\n![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-28-at-2.48.42-pm.png\")
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![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-28-at-1.11.40-pm.png\")
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![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/libc.png\")
Upon which the CBLManager class may be referenced to specify the \u2018storageType\u2019 property to be ForestDB.\u00a0 This is how we enable the iOS project to use now the ForestDB storage system.<\/p>\n![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-28-at-2.19.13-pm.png\")
<\/p>\n - (void)createDatabase {\r\n CBLManager* manager = [CBLManager sharedInstance];\r\n manager.storageType= @\"ForestDB\";\r\n NSError *error;\r\n _database = [[CBLManager sharedInstance] databaseNamed:@\"todosapp\" error:&error];\r\n}<\/code><\/pre>\nAndroid:<\/h4>\n
compile 'com.couchbase.lite:couchbase-lite-android:1.2.0'\r\ncompile 'com.couchbase.lite:couchbase-lite-android-forestdb:1.2.0'\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-28-at-3.17.20-pm.png\")
<\/p>\nmanager = new Manager(new AndroidContext(getApplicationContext()), Manager.DEFAULT_OPTIONS);\r\n\r\n\/\/install a view definition needed by the application\r\nDatabaseOptions options = new DatabaseOptions();\r\noptions.setCreate(true);\r\noptions.setStorageType(Manager.FORESTDB_STORAGE);\r\ndatabase = manager.openDatabase(DATABASE_NAME, options);<\/code><\/pre>\n![](\"\/wp-content\/original-assets\/2016\/february\/mobile-1.2-enable-forestdb\/screen-shot-2016-01-28-at-3.46.07-pm.png\")
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