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CouchDB brings peer-based data replication


By Alex Handy
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July 26, 2010 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Mobile devices and the move to the cloud have combined to form problems for which traditional SQL databases are unsuited. This is why the NoSQL movement has sprouted dozens of newly crafted databases for every imaginable problem.

For the Apache Foundation's CouchDB, replication and stability were the first priorities. On July 14, four years of work culminated in the release of Apache CouchDB 1.0, bringing with it the security features needed for enterprise applications.

Damien Katz created the CouchDB project after leaving the Lotus Notes team. He used his Notes knowledge to build a document database that could perform peer-based replication, along with a ground-up approach to tolerating node failure.

Version 1.0 puts the finishing touches on CouchDB's underpinnings, said Katz. Key to the purpose of the database is replication on a reliable and grand scale. Any node of a CouchDB cluster can be written to, and those changes will automatically trickle out to the other nodes, even if some of those other nodes are turned off at the time. And it doesn't matter how those nodes were turned off; Katz said that CouchDB is built to crash.

That's because the only way to turn off a CouchDB instance is with the Unix “kill” command. This is actually what the code does itself when a CouchDB instance is told to turn off. Katz claimed that, because CouchDB is designed to suddenly stop running, it can never corrupt the data it stores. It may sound unorthodox, but using a crash as the standard termination means there may be no way to surprise CouchDB.

“The replication stuff is the killer feature of CouchDB,” said Katz. “A lot of databases have some sort of replication capability, almost always master/slave, so reads can be spread across servers to reduce the read load. CouchDB uses peer-based replication, so any update can happen on any node and automatically replicate out. We have the ability to take a database offline so it's not connected to its other replicas, individually query it, then push that back to the replicas. It's fairly unique in the database world."


Related Search Term(s): CouchDB, NoSQL

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