Couchbase Capella is a scalable document-oriented database service in the cloud. Its existing Capella Operational service is based on a shared-nothing architecture and supports high volumes of low-latency queries and updates for JSON documents. Its new Capella Columnar cloud service complements the Operational service. The Capella Columnar service supports complex analytical queries (e.g., ad hoc joins and aggregations) over large collections of JSON documents that can originate from a variety of Couchbase and non-Couchbase data sources and formats and can either be stored and managed by the Capella Columnar service or externally stored and accessed on demand at query time. This paper describes the new Capella Columnar service, looking both over and under the hood.

Couchbase Server is a highly scalable document-oriented database management system. With a shared-nothing architecture, it exposes a fast key-value store with a managed cache for sub-millisecond data operations, indexing for fast queries, and a powerful query engine for executing declarative SQL-like queries. Its Query Service debuted several years ago and supports high volumes of low-latency queries and updates for JSON documents. Its recently introduced Analytics Service complements the Query Service. Couchbase Analytics, the focus of this paper, supports complex analytical queries (e.g., ad hoc joins and aggregations) over large collections of JSON documents. This paper describes the Analytics Service from the outside in, including its user model, its SQL++ based query language, and its MPP-based storage and query processing architecture. It also briefly touches on the relationship of Couchbase Analytics to Apache AsterixDB, the open source Big Data management system at the core of Couchbase Analytics.