What's New – Mobile

Announcing Couchbase Mobile 2.6

Couchbase Mobile extends Couchbase to the edge, securely managing and syncing data from any cloud to every mobile device. Build better and more responsive customer experiences across all mobile touchpoints and fully empower field teams with guaranteed data availability and millisecond response times, irrespective of network connectivity. Couchbase Mobile features an embedded database with SQL and full-text search for JSON, built-in synchronization, and end-to-end security from cloud to edge.

Key new features

Delta sync

The delta sync feature significantly reduces bandwidth consumption by syncing only the parts of a document that have changed. It works for data synchronization between Couchbase Lite-enabled mobile applications and Sync Gateway, and for peer-to-peer sync between Couchbase Lite clients.

Peer-to-peer sync

Couchbase Mobile makes it easier to build responsive applications that are always accessible, regardless of network availability. Data is synced directly between Couchbase Lite instances over any IP or non-IP based transport such as Bluetooth (regular and low energy), near-field communication (NFC), etc.

Use this technology with your favorite peer-to-peer platform communication framework like Apple's Multipeer Connectivity and Google's Nearby Connections API to set up a peer-to-peer network. This enables you to securely replicate data over a local network using a scalable, reliable, and performant replication protocol regardless of network connectivity.

On-device encryption

Couchbase Mobile allows encryption of the local embedded database, ensuring data security and privacy while at rest. End-to-end security has always been the cornerstone of the Couchbase Mobile platform as it powers business-critical applications that demand high levels of security and privacy.

Powerful query interface

Couchbase Lite provides a simple yet powerful query interface based on SQL that has been extended for JSON. Easy-to-learn APIs enable developers to become productive quickly with capabilities such as built-in thread safety, mutable properties, typed accessors, and blobs for accessing attachments. The fluent query builder API gives developers a consistent cross-platform experience. Predictive queries, available in Developer Preview, enable your mobile applications to use machine learning models to run predictive queries against data in your database.

Full-text search

Users can perform full-text searches on JSON documents stored in Couchbase Lite. Developers can create a mobile app search experience that mirrors Google, Yahoo, and other search experiences on the web.

The API for using full-text search is similar to the query API. Users can search for text, text fragments, and text connected by binary operators. Couchbase Lite locates the set of JSON documents that best matches those terms.

Replication capabilities

Couchbase Mobile’s WebSocket-based replication protocol is designed to be fast, efficient, and simple to implement, providing a symmetrical approach for client and server. Our replication technology supports extensive push and pull filtering capabilities and provides fine-grained eventing that allows applications to monitor the status of their replications and manage their documents automatically.

The replication protocol also consumes fewer resources on both the client and the server. As a result, more clients can connect concurrently, and they can synchronize data with lower latencies. The speed and low latency achieved with the replication protocol help deliver a highly responsive user experience.

Automatic conflict resolution

Couchbase Mobile will detect conflicts and automatically resolve them without additional code. It will also reduce the complexity involved in building distributed apps that share data among users and devices. Additionally, apps can specify custom conflict resolver policy that will override the default conflict resolution policy.

On-device replicas

An on-device replica enables developers to provide data recovery on the edge. It allows a Couchbase Lite replicator to store data on secondary storage that can then be ported to a different device. It is especially useful in scenarios where a user’s device is damaged and the data needs to be moved to a different device.