

Cloudant.com Refresh: CouchDB in the Cloud - jot
http://blog.cloudant.com/cloudantcom-refresh-couchdb-in-the-cloud

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bham
What is your take on CouchDB? After some initial investigation, I've all but
written off CouchDB for anything moderately write-heavy due to its single
writer at a time design. I'm by no means an expert on that however. Please
tell me what I'm missing about CouchDB.

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swannodette
If I recall Damien Katz recently added a "many writers" patch.

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kocolosk
Yep, Damien's patch greatly improved CouchDB's write throughput for the case
where you've got a pool of processes trying to write to the same DB
simultaneously.

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mark_l_watson
I have a beta account but I have not yet used it very much because I have
CouchDB running on two of my own servers, and usually on my laptop.

Except for not really being able to do ad-hoc queries (you write map/reduce
view functions which create indices) I like CouchDB. That said, I use MongoDB
a little more frequently because it is easier for me to use.

What I really like about CouchDB is the way it uses REST and JSON. I use Ruby
clients, and sometimes I prefer to just use simplehttp and json gems, and do
everything low level because it feels natural.

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bham
I think a good way to promote this would be to self-host the blog using a
CouchDB application running on Cloudant instead of using Posterous.

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encoderer
I disagree. I would only even consider using a schemaless DB in a case where I
need high performance logging of unstructured data. We use it at work as a hot
cache and as first line click & impression tracking.

I wouldn't be remotely impressed that it could serve a blog. It would be
meaningless to me.

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fmw
I'm wondering what differentiates this service from
<http://hosting.couch.io/>. Is it about extra GUI management options? Both
seem very interesting services, because as an existing CouchDB user I can
absolutely see the benefit of having an external database to replicate to.

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jot
I've used both hosting.couch.io and Cloudant. So far I've had the best
experience with Cloudant.

hosting.couch.io seems well geared for playing with CouchDB and building pure
CouchDB apps. There is clearly a great team behind it but they seemed to be
working on and distracted by a whole bunch of other things rather than
focusing on making the hosting service brilliant.

Cloudant feels like a more robust service that will scale as usage of my app
grows. They also have a great team but appear to be much more focused on
delivering the best hosted CouchDB service. They also have a number of funded
startups that are dependant on them which gives me more confidence that they
are taking the service seriously.

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ahoff
(full disclosure, I'm a founder at Cloudant)

Thanks for the kind words jot. The guys behind couch.io are smart and
talented, and they really know their couchdb, but I don't think that hosting
is their primary focus (they can correct me if I'm wrong).

The main technical difference between us and couch.io is the distribution
(clustering) layer we've built. This allows a single couch database to be
spread across multiple servers. It provides true horizontal scalability, not
just multi-master replication. A database can expand elastically based on
resource and concurrency needs. In our next release we'll be adding the
ability to tune robustness via quorum constants (a la Amazon's dynamo) on a
per-document basis. That should be coming soon.

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immad
Wow, a fully Ajax front page (<http://cloudant.com>). Looks nice but a bit
overkill?

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redorb
If you look at the source, you can see about 500-1000 words that aren't
displayed on the page / doesn't sit well with my "good intentions" meter.

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tvon
It's not ajax, it's javascript and css. All the content is on a single page.

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immad
Good point. I kind off broadly classify all javascript only pages as Ajax
though its not strictly. I guess with one page only it was probably easier to
make the website.

