Couchbase analytics: NoETL for scalable NoSQL data analysis

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.