CouchDB merges in BigCouch | Hacker News Reader

CouchDB merges in BigCouch

blogs.apache.org

95 pointsnslater33 comments

I think CouchDB is vastly underrated as a hacker database for toy projects. We're talking about an incredibly simple database, with powerful replication abilities, with brain-dead administration, and one-click offsite backup and synchronization, that requires no real client libraries to work with. It makes it comically easy for me to hack on toy projects on the road, then sync them right back up afterwards when I'm done.

I know CouchDB sometimes gets some flak for not performing as well as other NoSQLs. Anecdotally, that feels as if it's gotten a lot better over time, and this BigCouch merge may improve things further, but sometimes there's a case to be made for using something just because it's fun and easy to work with.

Why not use the community edition of couchbase?

Because Couchbase has very different features and an almost completely different interface. For example, there is no changes stream, etc.

The name lies a bit.

It's a horrible name.

Big difference for me is that Couchbase doesn't have an HTTP interface. That is one of my absolute favorite features of CouchDB (along with master-master replication and the changes stream).

I worked on both databases, they have entirely different advantages / disadvantages and use cases, none of the OP really apply to couchbase.

The only thing Couchbase has in common with CouchDB is the name, and some of the same people are involved. If you like CouchDB, there's no particular reason you'd like Couchbase (and visa versa).

The way we treat JSON is similar but the performance characteristics are radically different.

and the replication model

Here is why:

* No _changes feed. (TAPs won't do here sorry). I mean that is uber killer feature of CouchDB. Otherwise, just pick any other key value store.

* HTTP interface to DB : you can use CouchDB to store both your data and your code. That is very cool.

* Futon : that is the web based db and document browser and viewer. That is killer. Being able to see what is in your database and debug before that data is used by some other part of the system is invaluable.

We working on a new version of Futon. Adding a ton more features. Will be out later this year.

This is incredibly good news. CouchDB is a fantastic database that doesn't get the attention it deserves. The best part about this merge is that CouchDB will get the scaling benefits that BigCouch offers. The load balancing and clustering of BigCouch is going to be incredibly useful for scaling CouchDB.

I built BigCouch from source and played with it a few years ago. Cloudant is a cool company, and good of them to open source a big piece of their infrastructure.

I am taking a fresh look at CouchDB. I have always had an aversion to JavaScript, which is what CouchDB views are written in, but lately I have been getting into JS more because of Meteor and Ember.js. Off topic, but I find using a subset of JS, and keeping JSLint running in IntelliJ makes for a nice dev environment.

Take a look at chewbranca's work on Fauxton in the master branch of couchdb, and some of his personal riffs at https://github.com/chewbranca/mr-turtles. The idea is to use tools like you mentioned to run JS in browser, on server, and in the database.

Thanks - I just bookmarked that.

Hey Mark,

It turns out with CouchDB you can use other view languages. Some common ones are Python, Coffeescript and Erlang. It is extensible.

For example in some cases we found the Python viewer from the couchdb python driver package was faster than JS in some cases so we are using that.

Thanks, I didn't know about the CoffeeScript support. Nice!

Despite JavaScript, you can also use CoffeeScript and Erlang. The later is un-sandboxed and that's why it is not enabled per default.

Anyone familiar w/ the CouchDB community, can you describe how well it's working? From afar it seems to be a bit rudder less, but I could be misinterpreting the situation.

touchdb/couchbase-lite is pretty active. I use that to replicate data from a CouchDB cluster to Android and iOS devices, for a game.

Yeh the 3 founders essentially being pulled off the project to a competitor definitely took its toll.

However one founder has returned full time to the project, and while I would still describe it as 'in recovery' its definitely looking promising, there have been more contributors than ever this year, theres exciting work in progress in the works including this bigcouch merge and fauxton, as ell as couch related project like hood.ie and (forgive the self promotion) pouchdb.com

So its looking up, this email definitely sums up the current enthusiam for me - http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201307....

Dale, did you mean to link to this:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201307....

I did cheers

I found Jan Lehnardt's vision for CouchDB very compelling. It allows CouchDB to be the feature-rich core of a large, complex ecosystem, yet retain a ruthless focus on being the best multi-master replicating database available.

Thank you :)

See also Benoit Chesneau's CouchDB vision which he has partly implemented in his own fork:

https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201307...

Benoit is doing a great job contributing to CouchDB. He also moderates the CouchDB community on G+: https://plus.google.com/communities/112687873154936256826

I should observe that daleharvey is being very modest by the casual mention of PouchDB, which I think is actually one of the coolest things the Couch ecosystem has going for it right now. :)

PouchDB is serious. I hope Mozilla picks it up for their mobile OS.

The community is about pi/2 ahead of the external perception. We're a year away from losing the founder and the brand confusion with membase (unfortunate). That said, the committer base has nearly doubled in the last year and the project is really starting to move. I think the closer you get to the project the more excited you'll find people. I think the next few years will be very good for CouchDB.

I'm just using CouchDB right now for my side project. Cloudant is offering really great service although they don't provide multi-tenant service in Japan. But I'll go for Cloudant unless latency between Japan and Singapore matters.

By the way, I posted another link three days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088443

page isn't accessible at this time. does anyone have a short copy or something?

From https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/welcome_bigcouch via http://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/

THURSDAY JUL 25, 2013 Welcome BigCouch

Good news! Cloudant has announced the completion of the BigCouch merge. This is a huge step forward for CouchDB. So thank you to Cloudant, and thank you to the committers (particularly Robert Newson and Paul Davis) who slogged (and travelled the world to pair with each other) to make this happen.

What does this mean? Well, right now, the code is merged, but not released. So hold your clicks just a moment! Once the code has been tested, we will include it in one of our regular releases. (If you want to help us test, hop on to the dev@ mailing list!)

What’s new? The key accomplishment of the merged code is that BigCouch’s clustering capability, along with the rest of Cloudant’s other enhancements to CouchDB’s code base, will now be available in Apache CouchDB. This also includes improvements in compaction and replication speed, as well as boosts for high-concurrency access performance.

Painless replication has always been CouchDB's biggest feature. Now we get to take advantage of Cloudant’s experience running large distributed clusters in production for four years. With BigCouch merged in, CouchDB will be able to replicate data at a much larger scale.

But wait! That’s not all! Cloudant has decided to terminate their BigCouch fork of CouchDB, and instead focus future development on Apache CouchDB. This is excellent news for CouchDB, even more excellent news for the CouchDB community.

Here’s the original press release:

Cloudant Contributes Database Scalability and Fault-Tolerance Framework to Apache CouchDB™

And here are some highlights from the press:

Sofa, so good ... BigCouch relaxes into comfy Apache CouchDB (The Register)

Cloudant pitches one CouchDB for all (GigaOM)

Cloudant Merges BigCouch Into Apache CouchDB (eWeek)

Cloudant Breathes Life Into CouchDB - Merges BigCouch into Apache Project (CMSwire)

CouchDB Gets Cloudant's 'Super-Size Me' Scaling (InformationWeek)

Cloudant Merges BigCouch Code into Apache Open Source Database (The WHIR)

Cloudant Merges BigCouch Database into Open Source Apache CouchDB (The VAR Guy)

Cloudant merges distributed BigCouch code with Apache CouchDB (JAXenter)

Cloudant contributes database scalability and fault-tolerance framework to Apache CouchDB (SD Times)

P.S. Cloudant is also hosting a party at OSCON on July 25 to celebrate the news. (They’re booth #305 if you’re at the show.) And if all that wasn’t enough, stay tuned for news about a CouchDB conference that we should be announcing shortly…

Posted at 06:26PM Jul 25, 2013 by Noah in News | Comments[0] |

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