7 ms·

The Road to CouchDB 2.0

98 points by g4k 10y ago

gwbas1c 10y ago
I thought CouchDB was abandoned years ago?
- Xylakant 10y ago
  it's been alive and kicking all the time with various interesting implementations that can sync back to couch, for example pouchdb for browsers and/or mobile websites: https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/
  - mwambua 10y ago
    Thanks for the link. PouchDB seems to be a great example of an app that inherently works better with CouchDB/Cloudant than it would with MongoDB.
    - Xylakant 10y ago
      absolutely. I know some projects that implemented a mobile app with offline/sync capability using the couch/pouch combination. I haven't participated personally but from what the colleagues tell me it's working pretty well. (for all values of well that you can have when it comes to offline/sync. it's a tough problem.)
      - HodGreeley 10y ago
        You can take a look at Couchbase Mobile for native client offline+sync capabilities, too. PouchDB integrates with Couchbase Sync Gateway, so the combo is versatile.
- dahjelle 10y ago
  Perhaps you are thinking of when Damien Katz (the original author of CouchDB) left the CouchDB project for CouchBase [1] (from which he has also since moved on [2])? [1] http://damienkatz.net/2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html http://damienkatz.net/2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html [2] http://damienkatz.net/2013/09/human_after_all.html http://damienkatz.net/2013/09/human_after_all.html
- s_kilk 10y ago
  I got the same impression when I started looking at CouchDB in January this year. Seemed like it had been ages since the last release, and very little activity. Looks like they've just been busy for the past while working on this merge and (eventual) release of 2.0, will need to take another look.
sa_su_ke_75 10y ago
what are the new changes of 2.0 version?
- mark242 10y ago
  Primarily merging the changes that Cloudant (now an IBM product) made to Couch to turn a fairly simple implementation of NoSQL / MapReduce into a first-class datastore. Things like: * Native Lucene search, which you had to build as a weird add-on for Couch. Now it's full-featured out of the box. * Geospatial queries, also a weird add-on which only kind of worked in Couch, is also cooked in and is pretty strong now. * True node clustering and data sharding; Couch has always had really really easy replication between nodes, and getting master-master replication is essentially creating a document on each node. However, you had to store your entire data set on every node, which would grow out of control in a hurry. * A better auto-compactor. Couch 1.6 does fairly well but it's still a weird cron-based thing that can still fail horribly. The auto-compactor in Cloudant/Couch 2.0 is pretty solid and you don't have to worry about massive spikes in disk space consumption.
  - rakoo 10y ago
    Thanks for this list. One of the pain points of CouchDB was management of users: there is only database-level granularity, which is not enough for many applications (and one-database-per-user may not be practical). I know that Couchbase Sync Gateway uses channels (http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/develop/guides/sync-gateway/channels/developing/index.html http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/...) that look interesting. Do you know if there has been changes on this side for CouchDB 2.0 ?
    - y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
      Managing rights for users on document level granularity was pretty easy in 1.6. A simple js function (it's called a "design document") to handle the logic and you are done. Just an example: function(newDoc, oldDoc, userCtx) { if (userCtx.roles.indexOf('can-write-sessions') !== -1 || userCtx.roles.indexOf('admin') !== -1) { return; } else { throw ({ forbidden: 'can-write-sessions role missing' }); } } Why do you think that the Couchbase Sync Gateway is better?
dahjelle 10y ago
If I recall correctly, built-in clustering and the new Mango query language are the big new features. Are there others?
niftich 10y ago
Summary: CouchDB 2.0 is a unification of the CouchDB 1.x line (a single-node DB) with BigCouch (which was a fork by Cloudant that added proper out-of-the-box clustering).
doublerebel 10y ago
I've had great experiences with Cloudant's service and features, this will be a huge boon to the open-source community. I've tried the other Couch flavors and cloud hosts and there is no comparison on features, responsiveness and stability.
reubano 10y ago
You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this. I seriously thought couchdb was dead. Looking forward to more frequent releases in the future.
refrigerator 10y ago
We've been using a self-hosted CouchDB 1.6.x instance on AWS, and actually a few days ago decided to try hosting the pre-RC version of 2.0. What are the benefits of using a hosted service like Cloudant over self-hosting?
brightball 10y ago
Looks like a very solid release. CouchDB has always had that niche as an ultra reliable and steady NoSQL DB while being the best of breed option for offline syncing / healing separated nodes. It fell behind in terms of perception while Mongo was chasing benchmarks early on but has seemingly continued to just keep chugging along with it's design decisions. General community, "You sure about that? I mean...benchmarks." Couch, "Yep...we're sure." * few years later * General community, "Have you seen CouchDB? This thing is really solid. Did you ever read that Hacker News thread about how terribly unreliable Mongo is?"
- tormeh 10y ago
  MongoDB is written in C++, C and Javascript. CouchDB is written in Erlang. It's not weird that it ended up like this.
  - markpapadakis 10y ago
    The language, especially the languages you enumerated, rarely have anything to do with the actual final product's qualities (including it performance, reliability and ease of use). Mongo is unreliable because too much effort was spent making it easy to install and use it immediately (it works!) and little to no care apparently went into anything else. Nothing to do with the choice of C++ for Mongo, or the choice of Erlang for Couch.
    - reddit_clone 10y ago
      I wouldn't be too sure of that. Each language's ecosystem fosters certain ways of approaching and solving problems. For example, Erlang/OTP brings a lot to the table. Being functional, it would protect you against certain types of errors leaving you free to solve more complex problems. You pay for it with run time performance. String operations are slow etc. C++ is very fast and very sharp. Not easy to get everything right. (Some sort Greenspun's rule would apply here I think. Substitute Erlang for Common Lisp).
      - 10y ago
noinsight 10y ago
Exciting news, I just started using CouchDB in a new project and it works really well. Is the new Fauxton interface included? The old GUI feels more like a proof of concept than an actual user interface. Fauxton would be appreciated.
- refrigerator 10y ago
  yeah, Fauxton comes included in 2.0 (and it's really good!)
y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
CouchDB is awesome. We evaluated it some time ago¹ and we all thought that the way it worked, the performance, the management are light years ahead of everything else in this space. We ended up not using it because it looked like it was dead. I am so happy that it is not, and I hope this 2.0 release will bring in some more community love. It absolutely deserves it! ¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757015 (couchbase sales people came answering, even if couchbase is a completely different product that covers different usecases)
- HodGreeley 10y ago
  Seems like you're confusing Couchbase Mobile and Couchbase Server. And that wasn't a sales person that responded. It was the head of Couchbase Mobile engineering.
  - y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
    > Seems like you're confusing Couchbase Mobile and Couchbase Server. Probably. But is that really my fault? There is CouchDB, CouchIO, CouchOne, Couchbase, Couchbase Server, Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase Lite, CouchApps, BigCouch, Touchbase, Membase, Memcached, MemcacheDB... all different and yet related in a way not at all obvious from the names alone. First there was CouchDB, a database created by Damien Katz, a former IBM developer. Its official name was changed to Apache CouchDB after it became an Apache project. A company named CouchIO was founded to work on Apache CouchDB and later changed its name to CouchOne (by "its name" I mean the company name - not the database name). CouchOne (formerly CouchIO) merged with Membase (formerly NorthScale) to form a new company called Couchbase. Membase (the company) developed Membase (a product of the same name). Membase was created by several leaders of the Memcached project and it used the Memcached protocol. After the merger of CouchOne and Membase, Couchbase continued the development of the Membase software and later changed its name to Couchbase Server. Today I think most people believe that Couchbase Server is a new version of CouchDB but it is in fact a new version of Membase. It still uses the Memcached protocol and not the RESTful API of CouchDB. Meanwhile CouchDB is still CouchDB, actively maintained and enhanced as an Apache project. http://stackoverflow.com/a/15184612/512324 http://stackoverflow.com/a/15184612/512324
merpnderp 10y ago
I don't think any discussion of CouchDB is complete without mentioning PouchDB. And now that CouchDB will have clustering out of the box, there's all the more reason to support offline versions of your database in your webapps. https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/
_Marak_ 10y ago
CouchDB has not let me down once in over seven years of production usage. I'm not sure what other software I could say that about.
- lokedhs 10y ago
  Same here. The core of our chat application is centred around CouchDB and RabbitMQ. Neither of which have ever let us down. It can't be a coincidence that both of them are written in Erlang.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I am going to give CouchDB another look. I used to use it a lot, and experimented with BigCouch, but I didn't used to like JavaScript, so doing views, etc. was a pain. Now, I don't dislike JavaScript so much and CouchDB fits some use cases I have.
- lokedhs 10y ago
  CouchDB supports writing views in Erlang, if you prefer that. It's also faster than Javascript, although it changes some of the ordering semantics of the resulting views. I decided to write my views[1] in Parenscript[2]. Might not be for everybody, but it makes them fit a lot better in the rest of the application. [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d8659e7dc0f2e9d0da0c23c/src/potato/views.lisp#L296 https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d865... [2] https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/ https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/
carterschonwald 10y ago
I'm pretty confused about where the couchdb repo lives. Can anyone point me to it? Oddly: https://github.com/couchbase/couchdb?files=1 https://github.com/couchbase/couchdb?files=1 seems to be more like the code than any of the Apache stuff
- gtirloni 10y ago
  CouchDB != Couchbase https://github.com/apache?query=couchdb https://github.com/apache?query=couchdb
  - carterschonwald 10y ago
    No shit. Now explain to me why the Apache version is split into like 20 different rebar git repos but has had some core parts untouched for 1-2 years? https://github.com/apache/couchdb-couch/tree/master/src https://github.com/apache/couchdb-couch/tree/master/src

98 points by g4k 10y ago

gwbas1c 10y ago

I thought CouchDB was abandoned years ago?

Xylakant 10y ago
it's been alive and kicking all the time with various interesting implementations that can sync back to couch, for example pouchdb for browsers and/or mobile websites: https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/
- mwambua 10y ago
  Thanks for the link. PouchDB seems to be a great example of an app that inherently works better with CouchDB/Cloudant than it would with MongoDB.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    absolutely. I know some projects that implemented a mobile app with offline/sync capability using the couch/pouch combination. I haven't participated personally but from what the colleagues tell me it's working pretty well. (for all values of well that you can have when it comes to offline/sync. it's a tough problem.)
    - HodGreeley 10y ago
      You can take a look at Couchbase Mobile for native client offline+sync capabilities, too. PouchDB integrates with Couchbase Sync Gateway, so the combo is versatile.
dahjelle 10y ago
Perhaps you are thinking of when Damien Katz (the original author of CouchDB) left the CouchDB project for CouchBase [1] (from which he has also since moved on [2])? [1] http://damienkatz.net/2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html http://damienkatz.net/2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html [2] http://damienkatz.net/2013/09/human_after_all.html http://damienkatz.net/2013/09/human_after_all.html
s_kilk 10y ago
I got the same impression when I started looking at CouchDB in January this year. Seemed like it had been ages since the last release, and very little activity. Looks like they've just been busy for the past while working on this merge and (eventual) release of 2.0, will need to take another look.

sa_su_ke_75 10y ago

what are the new changes of 2.0 version?

mark242 10y ago
Primarily merging the changes that Cloudant (now an IBM product) made to Couch to turn a fairly simple implementation of NoSQL / MapReduce into a first-class datastore. Things like: * Native Lucene search, which you had to build as a weird add-on for Couch. Now it's full-featured out of the box. * Geospatial queries, also a weird add-on which only kind of worked in Couch, is also cooked in and is pretty strong now. * True node clustering and data sharding; Couch has always had really really easy replication between nodes, and getting master-master replication is essentially creating a document on each node. However, you had to store your entire data set on every node, which would grow out of control in a hurry. * A better auto-compactor. Couch 1.6 does fairly well but it's still a weird cron-based thing that can still fail horribly. The auto-compactor in Cloudant/Couch 2.0 is pretty solid and you don't have to worry about massive spikes in disk space consumption.
- rakoo 10y ago
  Thanks for this list. One of the pain points of CouchDB was management of users: there is only database-level granularity, which is not enough for many applications (and one-database-per-user may not be practical). I know that Couchbase Sync Gateway uses channels (http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/develop/guides/sync-gateway/channels/developing/index.html http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/...) that look interesting. Do you know if there has been changes on this side for CouchDB 2.0 ?
  - y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
    Managing rights for users on document level granularity was pretty easy in 1.6. A simple js function (it's called a "design document") to handle the logic and you are done. Just an example: function(newDoc, oldDoc, userCtx) { if (userCtx.roles.indexOf('can-write-sessions') !== -1 || userCtx.roles.indexOf('admin') !== -1) { return; } else { throw ({ forbidden: 'can-write-sessions role missing' }); } } Why do you think that the Couchbase Sync Gateway is better?

dahjelle 10y ago

If I recall correctly, built-in clustering and the new Mango query language are the big new features. Are there others?

niftich 10y ago

Summary: CouchDB 2.0 is a unification of the CouchDB 1.x line (a single-node DB) with BigCouch (which was a fork by Cloudant that added proper out-of-the-box clustering).

doublerebel 10y ago

I've had great experiences with Cloudant's service and features, this will be a huge boon to the open-source community. I've tried the other Couch flavors and cloud hosts and there is no comparison on features, responsiveness and stability.

reubano 10y ago

You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this. I seriously thought couchdb was dead. Looking forward to more frequent releases in the future.

refrigerator 10y ago

We've been using a self-hosted CouchDB 1.6.x instance on AWS, and actually a few days ago decided to try hosting the pre-RC version of 2.0. What are the benefits of using a hosted service like Cloudant over self-hosting?

brightball 10y ago

Looks like a very solid release. CouchDB has always had that niche as an ultra reliable and steady NoSQL DB while being the best of breed option for offline syncing / healing separated nodes. It fell behind in terms of perception while Mongo was chasing benchmarks early on but has seemingly continued to just keep chugging along with it's design decisions. General community, "You sure about that? I mean...benchmarks." Couch, "Yep...we're sure." * few years later * General community, "Have you seen CouchDB? This thing is really solid. Did you ever read that Hacker News thread about how terribly unreliable Mongo is?"

tormeh 10y ago
MongoDB is written in C++, C and Javascript. CouchDB is written in Erlang. It's not weird that it ended up like this.
- markpapadakis 10y ago
  The language, especially the languages you enumerated, rarely have anything to do with the actual final product's qualities (including it performance, reliability and ease of use). Mongo is unreliable because too much effort was spent making it easy to install and use it immediately (it works!) and little to no care apparently went into anything else. Nothing to do with the choice of C++ for Mongo, or the choice of Erlang for Couch.
  - reddit_clone 10y ago
    I wouldn't be too sure of that. Each language's ecosystem fosters certain ways of approaching and solving problems. For example, Erlang/OTP brings a lot to the table. Being functional, it would protect you against certain types of errors leaving you free to solve more complex problems. You pay for it with run time performance. String operations are slow etc. C++ is very fast and very sharp. Not easy to get everything right. (Some sort Greenspun's rule would apply here I think. Substitute Erlang for Common Lisp).
    - 10y ago

noinsight 10y ago

Exciting news, I just started using CouchDB in a new project and it works really well. Is the new Fauxton interface included? The old GUI feels more like a proof of concept than an actual user interface. Fauxton would be appreciated.

refrigerator 10y ago
yeah, Fauxton comes included in 2.0 (and it's really good!)

y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago

CouchDB is awesome. We evaluated it some time ago¹ and we all thought that the way it worked, the performance, the management are light years ahead of everything else in this space. We ended up not using it because it looked like it was dead. I am so happy that it is not, and I hope this 2.0 release will bring in some more community love. It absolutely deserves it! ¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757015 (couchbase sales people came answering, even if couchbase is a completely different product that covers different usecases)

HodGreeley 10y ago
Seems like you're confusing Couchbase Mobile and Couchbase Server. And that wasn't a sales person that responded. It was the head of Couchbase Mobile engineering.
- y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
  > Seems like you're confusing Couchbase Mobile and Couchbase Server. Probably. But is that really my fault? There is CouchDB, CouchIO, CouchOne, Couchbase, Couchbase Server, Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase Lite, CouchApps, BigCouch, Touchbase, Membase, Memcached, MemcacheDB... all different and yet related in a way not at all obvious from the names alone. First there was CouchDB, a database created by Damien Katz, a former IBM developer. Its official name was changed to Apache CouchDB after it became an Apache project. A company named CouchIO was founded to work on Apache CouchDB and later changed its name to CouchOne (by "its name" I mean the company name - not the database name). CouchOne (formerly CouchIO) merged with Membase (formerly NorthScale) to form a new company called Couchbase. Membase (the company) developed Membase (a product of the same name). Membase was created by several leaders of the Memcached project and it used the Memcached protocol. After the merger of CouchOne and Membase, Couchbase continued the development of the Membase software and later changed its name to Couchbase Server. Today I think most people believe that Couchbase Server is a new version of CouchDB but it is in fact a new version of Membase. It still uses the Memcached protocol and not the RESTful API of CouchDB. Meanwhile CouchDB is still CouchDB, actively maintained and enhanced as an Apache project. http://stackoverflow.com/a/15184612/512324 http://stackoverflow.com/a/15184612/512324

merpnderp 10y ago

I don't think any discussion of CouchDB is complete without mentioning PouchDB. And now that CouchDB will have clustering out of the box, there's all the more reason to support offline versions of your database in your webapps. https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/

_Marak_ 10y ago

CouchDB has not let me down once in over seven years of production usage. I'm not sure what other software I could say that about.

lokedhs 10y ago
Same here. The core of our chat application is centred around CouchDB and RabbitMQ. Neither of which have ever let us down. It can't be a coincidence that both of them are written in Erlang.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I am going to give CouchDB another look. I used to use it a lot, and experimented with BigCouch, but I didn't used to like JavaScript, so doing views, etc. was a pain. Now, I don't dislike JavaScript so much and CouchDB fits some use cases I have.

lokedhs 10y ago
CouchDB supports writing views in Erlang, if you prefer that. It's also faster than Javascript, although it changes some of the ordering semantics of the resulting views. I decided to write my views[1] in Parenscript[2]. Might not be for everybody, but it makes them fit a lot better in the rest of the application. [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d8659e7dc0f2e9d0da0c23c/src/potato/views.lisp#L296 https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d865... [2] https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/ https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/

carterschonwald 10y ago

I'm pretty confused about where the couchdb repo lives. Can anyone point me to it? Oddly: https://github.com/couchbase/couchdb?files=1 https://github.com/couchbase/couchdb?files=1 seems to be more like the code than any of the Apache stuff

gtirloni 10y ago
CouchDB != Couchbase https://github.com/apache?query=couchdb https://github.com/apache?query=couchdb
- carterschonwald 10y ago
  No shit. Now explain to me why the Apache version is split into like 20 different rebar git repos but has had some core parts untouched for 1-2 years? https://github.com/apache/couchdb-couch/tree/master/src https://github.com/apache/couchdb-couch/tree/master/src