Database-as-a-Service company
Cloudant has integrated the core capabilities of its BigCouch distributed database service to Apache's CouchDB project. Cloudant’s technology stack is underpinned by BigCouch, an open source version of CouchDB which was developed by Cloudant to facilitate "large-scale, globally distributed applications". Cloudant now intends to stop BigCouch development to allow the organization to participate in the CouchDB community.
Before developing BigCouch in 2008, Cloudant's co-founders used CouchDB to manage and distribute the huge amounts of data CERN’s Large Hadron Collider generates on a second-by-second basis. BigCouch code has now been added to CouchDB, meaning CouchDB can now be utilized for larger scale projects. To add the code, Cloudant imported sections of BigCouch code into the Apache CouchDB repositories. The database was then adapted to run in a clustered environment and enhanced to improve its ability to replicate databases across clusters and between data centers.
Apache CouchDB features an enhanced compactor process that Cloudant contributed to the project. The compactor process generates "smaller and better-organized post-compaction databases". This significantly increases compaction and replication speeds and improves high-concurrency access performance. Further enhancements include faster index update speeds, updated aggregate reduction functions, smooth hot-code updates, improved logging, and streamlined libraries.
The CouchDB with BigCouch functionality will be released following the Apache community release process and a preview of the merged software is currently available.
"There are a lot of reasons people love CouchDB, like its elegant programming model, data durability, flexible indexing, and, most of all, its unique way of replicating and synching data across data centers or devices," explained Cloudant's CTO and co-founder Adam Kocoloski. “We’re merging the horizontal scaling and fault-tolerance framework we built for BigCouch into CouchDB so people can more easily scale all that CouchDB goodness across multiple servers and keep it running nonstop. It’s our way of saying thanks and helping to grow the community of CouchDB developers and users.”
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