{"id":7282,"date":"2019-08-09T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-08-09T17:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/?p=7282"},"modified":"2025-06-13T17:21:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T00:21:59","slug":"couchbase-6-5-scan-consistency-in-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/couchbase-6-5-scan-consistency-in-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"Couchbase 6.5 \u2013 Scan Consistency in Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the GA back in Nov 2018, Couchbase Analytics is being used in multiple verticals for rapid time to insight \u2013 ad-hoc analysis by a payment provider,\u00a0 shopping cart analysis by an e-tailer, next gen ticket booking engine by a global airline, real-time movement of food carts inside a baseball stadium as fans fill it up – and many more.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the initial release, one of the design goals of the system was the availability of the Analytics service to run queries even when rebalance, failover, or rollback operations were being performed on a cluster. As a result, the Analytics service would return query results even when data was being moved or re-partitioned. This design was tailored for developer productivity and enabled DevOps teams to independently rebalance, failover or rollback a Couchbase cluster.<\/span><\/p>\n

As customers have rolled out Analytics in production, a common request is to ensure that non-monotonic results are not returned. Non-monotonic behavior is when a query that is evaluated at a certain time C returns a result that was current back at time A, a much earlier point in time, with intervening queries having returned more recent results. The figure below illustrates the concept.<\/span><\/p>\n

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This is especially true for customers running business-critical applications on Couchbase like consumer spending, sales per quarter, items in the shopping cart, inventory etc. Customers don\u2019t want reports, dashboards, analysis and consequently the insights to be affected by cluster operations while running such business-critical applications.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To ensure that future queries will only return once the ingestion of data into Analytics is back to the state where queries were run previously, we are introducing \u201cscan consistency\u201d in the upcoming release.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Scan consistency refers to the fact that the data in the Analytics service is consistent with the state of data in the data service.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The goal of scan consistency is to avoid non-monotonic behavior by not returning query results before a previously valid state is reached once again.<\/span><\/p>\n

To do this, all you need to do is to set the appropriate preferences in the query workbench. I\u2019ve attached a screenshot below with the preference \u201cscan consistency\u201d set to either of the following:<\/span><\/p>\n