What is a couchbase pool

Question

In couch base URL, e.g. server:port/pools/default what exactly a couch base pool is. Will it always be default or we can change it.

There is some text written there

http://www.couchbase.com/docs/couchbase-manual-1.8/couchbase-admin-restapi-key-concepts-resources.html

but I cannot really get it 100%. Please anyone can explain.

Answer 1

A long time ago the Couchbase engineers intended to build out a concept of having pools similar to zfs pools, but for a distributed database. The feature isn't dead, but just never got much attention compared to other database features that needed to be added. What ended up happening was that the pools/default just ended up being a placeholder for something that the engineers wanted to build in the future. In the old days the idea was that a pool would be a subset of buckets that was assigned to a subset of nodes in the cluster and that this would help with management of large clusters (100+ nodes).

So right now I would say don't worry about the whole pools concept because in the current (2.x releases) this is a placeholder that doesn't have any special meaning. In the future though there will likely be a feature around the pools concept and it will be well documented. Please also note that no decisions have been made about what Couchbase will do with pools, how exactly they will work, or when they will be implemented. This post is only meant to give the history for why the pools concept exists.