That's funny, I just installed that over the weekend and was testing it out. It's really good but what sort of through me off was the high $/node licensing fee if you want the Enterprise edition. It basically starts at $5k/year/node and that's just too oppressive.

Do you use the Community Edition and if so is it generally stable / suits your needs? I didn't read your article but I'll check it out tonight.

I'm a cofounder of Couchbase. Almost all our code is Apache 2.0, and we make the Community builds available for everyone. Enterprise builds are free to use for a small test cluster.

Unless you are a business where $5k/node looks reasonable to pay for peace of mind, you are probably fine with the Community Edition. A lot of the customers paying for Enterprise Edition are moving to Couchbase from Oracle, so they are paying less per node and running fewer nodes than they used to.

As far as I can tell the Community Edition lags far behind the Enterprise Edition in stability and improvements. The latest available Community Edition is v3.0.1, released in October 2014. Since then, there has been a v3.0.2 edition released in December 2014, and a v3.0.3 released in March 2015, both of which had "critical bug fixes" according to the release notes, plus a new version, 3.1.0, released in July 2015. None of these post-3.0.1 versions are available as a Community Edition, they're only available to Enterprise customers -- is that correct?

The Couchbase web site says: "Bug fixes and new features are eventually integrated with the Community Edition (CE), but this typically takes several weeks." But from what I can tell it's not "several weeks" -- it's at least 10 months.

Am I misunderstanding something?

Hi, it seems we missed correcting this page. It takes months not weeks to release updates to CE. The releases after 3.0.1 (3.0.2 and others) are maintenance releases with bug fixes. 3.1 is a recent release and it does contain features. We would normally push a community edition version or 3.1 in several months after the release but we are close to pushing out 4.0 and that incorporates 3.1 enhancements and more. I am expecting that we will get a 4.0 community edition out that will supersede the 3.1 release and will deliver these features to you soon.

If you want to use the latest features without waiting for a CE build, it's getting easier to build Couchbase Server all the time. This readme is where our new hires start: https://github.com/couchbase/manifest

Thanks for pointing this out... I don't have any experience with CouchBase/CouchDB. But I do appreciate open-source database options, especially those where the open version closely matches the commercially supported options.

If bug fixes take weeks to get to the CE, as one post below quoted from Couchbase's website, how is it possible that you say that the CE is probably fine?

I'd rather say it's pretty useless. I wouldn't run anything where a bug fix (which could be a data corruption issue, a crash...) may take weeks to be fixed.

Unless I'm missing something, my opinion is: either use the commercial version or use a different product. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Hi, if you are experiencing corruption of data with the community edition, please let us know. We will take a look at that immediately.

The paid version of the software funds the community edition for Couchbase. I cannot say our system is perfect and I am certainly happy to hear feedback on how you'd like to see community vs enterprise edition configured. Posting here is fine or I am at - [email protected]. thanks -cihan

Ah, I apologize 'oppressive' isn't the right word. I really meant 'outside of our budget', but I'll certainly be test-driving the CE this month. Thanks again.