{"id":9783,"date":"2021-08-03T00:00:43","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T07:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/?p=9783"},"modified":"2025-06-13T20:46:01","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T03:46:01","slug":"scopes-and-collections-for-modern-multi-tenant-applications-couchbase-7-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/scopes-and-collections-for-modern-multi-tenant-applications-couchbase-7-0\/","title":{"rendered":"How Scopes & Collections Simplify Multi-Tenant App Deployments on Couchbase"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now it’s easier than ever to build and deploy microservices and multi-tenant applications on Couchbase.<\/strong> The 7.0 release introduces a new data organization feature called Scopes and Collections.<\/p>\n

Scopes and Collections allow logical isolation of different types of data, independent lifecycle management and security control at multiple levels of granularity. Application developers use them to organize and isolate their data. DevOps and admins find the multiple levels of role-based access control (RBAC) \u2013 at the Bucket, Scope and Collection level \u2013 a powerful option to host microservices and tenants at scale.<\/p>\n

The full functionality of this feature is now available in Couchbase Server 7.0<\/a>. A limited functionality Developer Preview was already available in release 6.5, and some of you may have already kicked the tires on that.<\/p>\n

What Are Couchbase Scopes and Collections<\/h2>\n

Scopes and Collections are logical containers within a Couchbase Bucket<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s helpful to think of Collections as tables within a relational database but without the data rigidity. Scopes are a set of related Collections, making them similar to an RDBMS schema. But in both cases, Scopes and Collections are more flexible since they store JSON documents.<\/p>\n

The table below shows the mapping of familiar RDBMS constructs to Couchbase:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"RDBMS

Mapping RDBMS concepts to Couchbase<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

Here is an example of organizing the Couchbase Travel App data with Scopes and Collections:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"Couchbase

An example of Scopes and Collections with an example dataset<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

How to Create and Use Scopes & Collections<\/h2>\n

You can create Scopes and Collections from any of the Couchbase SDKs, couchbase-cli<\/code>, REST APIs, N1QL or from the UI.<\/p>\n

In particular, N1QL<\/a>N1QL queries become much simpler and syntactically briefer as you no longer need to qualify different document types using where type = xxx<\/code>. Instead you simply refer to the Collection directly.<\/p>\n

In the example shown below, we use N1QL (I executed the N1QL statements using cbq shell<\/a>) to create a Scope, a couple of Collections and some indexes. Then we run a simple query that joins two Collections.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"Create

A N1QL query to create a Scope, Collections and indexes<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

The Scale of Scopes & Collections<\/h2>\n

Couchbase currently allows you to have 30 Buckets in a single cluster. Scopes and Collections allow you to create orders-of-magnitude higher numbers of these entities.<\/p>\n

Since Collections actually contain the data and Scopes organize related Collections, you typically have fewer Scopes than Collections. Global Secondary Indexes (GSIs) are created on Collections, and a Collection commonly has multiple indexes.<\/p>\n

Keeping these requirements in mind, here is the scale of these entities that you can create in Couchbase 7.0 (a lot of them!):<\/p>\n