We believe that it takes a community to design, build and ship great software. So today, I’m excited to announce a new program called “Couchbase Developer Builds.” The goal of the program is to keep you updated on the exciting features we are building and to get your feedback.

So, what is a Couchbase Developer Build? If you’re a developer and want to try out the leading-edge bits from Couchbase, developer builds are for you in your developer environment.

Essentially, these are builds are directly from the main code line of our next major release, with light-weight quality tests run on top of it. This means that you might run into some rough edges and bugs while you try out these builds. The forums will provide access to the Couchbase user community to help troubleshoot issues, get questions answered and collect your feedback.

Here are a few important things to know about our Developer Builds:

1. These binaries are pre-release and are intended for experimental purposes only. They should NOT be used for staging or production environments.
2. The new features that you experience in developer builds are still under development, which means they could change significantly before the final release of the product.
3. You’ll need a fresh install of Couchbase Server to use these builds.

Please provide us with your feedback!

We are shooting for a monthly cadence starting this month. 

What’s exciting in the January Developer Build? With every developer build, we hope to showcase some exciting features that we have built, and need your feedback.

Here are some key features for the January Developer Build: 

• The new Spock UI: This re-design of the Couchbase Web console offers better usability, increased power and flexibility. You’ll get a new look and feel, improved navigation, and enhancements to query workbench.

• Subqueries over nested collections: So far, subqueries over nested collections in a document required retrieving the same document again. With this improvement, complex N1QL operations can be performed on the nested collection on the same document without additional document fetch.

  For example:

  SELECT id, (SELECT RAW SUM(ol.price) FROM orders.orderlines ol)[0] AS total FROM orders;
  
  SELECT custId, id, (SELECT ol.* FROM orders.orderlines ol ORDER BY ol.price DESC) orderlines FROM orders;
  
  SELECT custId, id, (SELECT ol.* FROM orders.orderlines ol WHERE ol.productId IN ["lunch", "drink"] ORDER BY ol.price) orderlines FROM orders;

  
  

• CURL function for N1QL: This newly added N1QL function will provide a conservative set of curl functionality built into the N1QL language.

  For example:

  Select curl ("POST", "http://localhost:8093/query/service", {"data" : "statement=select *  from system:keyspaces"});

  
  

• CBQ Quiet: This N1QL client (CBQ) improvement provides a cbq option (-q) to disable echoing of queries in the input source file (-f option).

  • ./cbq -q

  • \SET quiet true;

• FTS updates: If you haven’t got a chance to play around with Full-Text Search (FTS) in Couchbase, you should give it a try on the developer builds. With the developer build, we’ve fixed a number of bug for FTS. You might also want to play around with FTS using our SDKs. 

Keep an eye out for upcoming blogs that will touch upon each of these features in more detail.

Getting the Developer Builds

It is easy to get your hands on the developer preview. Just visit www.couchbase.com/downloads and click the “Developer” tab. 

Remember this before you take the plunge: The code for our next major release is still under active development, which means that you can have an impact on the final version of the product. Give us feedback on your experience, and we’ll listen.

We’re constantly in awe of the amazing things our community can do with our software, and we hope you continue providing your feedback during this period. Providing feedback is simple! You can find all the ways to make your voice heard here: http://forums.couchbase.com or Stackoverflow.