Curator's Note: The content of this article was written by Dipti Bonkar over at the Couchbase blog. 

I'm excited to announce the release of Couchbase Server 2.1.0 Enterprise Edition. The Couchbase Architecture remains one of the core strengths of Couchbase Server and with this release, we have further strengthened the fundamental architecture and extended the breadth of use cases that Couchbase supports. In addition, this release includes several features that continue to enhance the operational and administrative capabilities of our distributed database. Here are some of the highlights of the latest release.

• Multi-threaded persistence engine - The new multi-threaded persistence engine dramatically improves disk utilization. In particular it expands the use cases and workloads that Couchbase supports. Users can now tune their databases depending on their hardware configuration and application workloads.  Multiple read/writer I/O dispatchers increase I/O bandwidth utilization, improving reading and writing data from disk. This is particularly useful for write heavy workloads or if the application's active data working set requires heavy disk access. You can learn more here:http://www.couchbase.com/docs/couchbase-manual-2.1.0/couchbase-introduction-architecture-diskstorage.html

• Optimistic XDCR - Cross data center replication built in to a Couchbase cluster is designed to optimize for bandwidth by default. Given that XDCR is disk-to-memory, optimizations like mutation de-duplication as well as pre-checking the target cluster to see if the mutation is required to be shipped across helps minimize usage of bandwidth. 

  However, for some use cases user may want to optimistically replicate all mutations to the other side to improve latency of XDCR across clusters. With Couchbase Server 2.1, you can now specify an optimistic XDCR size threshold. For documents with size within the threshold, no pre-check will be performed and the mutation will be replicated to the other side. This is particularly useful in the case of active-active replication topologies.    

• Couchbase Server Health Check tool - Maintaining the health of a Couchbase cluster is critical for admins. With Couchbase Server 2.1.0, we have added the health check tool that complements Couchbase's admin console to provide in-depth information about key metrics to users.    

• Hostname and IP address management - You can now configure Couchbase with hostnames or IP addresses depending on your deployment setup. In particular, this feature helps isolate the system from the disruption of IP changes in a cloud environment.    

• Rebalance progress indicators - Depending on the amount of data being managed by the Couchbase cluster, a rebalance operation may take time to complete. Our new rebalance progress indicators provide fine-grained details into the rebalance operation including the number of buckets, number of partitions and even the number of documents that have been transferred. This will help sys admins gain in-depth visibility into the ongoing admin tasks via the Couchbase console.  

In addition to these improvements there are several other performance and stability fixes that improve the user experience across all supported platforms. To learn more about this release you can take a look at our documentation on our new user community portal:http://www.couchbase.com/documentation

With a growing user community, our new portal will provide lots of great technical content and serve as a focal point for community knowledge sharing. The portal hosts a new Q&A application that will replace the existing Couchbase Forums for community-based support as well.      

I look forward to your feedback on our latest release as well as our new community portal. Give 2.1.0 a try! Download it here: http://www.couchbase.com/download