Articles tagged CouchDB

The views expressed in this blog are strictly personal, and do not necessarily represent the views of Evident Software.

NoSQL DB basics for the RDBMS-savvy

Date: February 27, 2011
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By Bill Nigh

What does a traditional RDBMS programmer or architect need to understand to be productive with NoSQL (Not-only SQL technologies) and DCP (data caching platforms)?

I asked this question of our development team.

Here’s their list of things to know:

  1. Understand how ACID compares with BASE (Basically Available, Soft-state, Eventually Consistent)
  2. Understand persistence vs non-persistence, i.e., some NoSQL technologies are entirely in-memory data stores
  3. Recognize there are entirely different data models from traditional normalized tabular formats: Columnar (Cassandra) vs key/value (Memcached) vs document-oriented (CouchDB)  vs graph oriented (Neo4j)
  4. Be ready to deal with no standard interface like JDBC/ODBC or standarized query language like SQL; every NoSQL tool has a different interface
  5. Architects: rewire your brain to the fact that web-scale/large-scale NoSQL systems are distributed across dozens to hundreds of servers and networks as opposed to a shared database system
  6. Get used to the possibly uncomfortable realization that you won’t know where data lives (most of the time)
  7. Get used to the fact that data may not always be consistent; ‘eventually consistent’ is one of the key elements of the BASE model (I see this latency issue all the time in Twitter, in ‘Followers’ list)
  8. Get used to the fact that data may not always be available
  9. Understand that some solutions are partition-tolerant and some are not

These attributes vary from one system to another. It’s as important to understand the differences among NoSQL technologies as it is important to understand how they differ from a traditional RDBMS.

Here is a pretty good list of the many NoSQL products, from a respected member of the community, Alex Popescu.

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Couchbase, Membase and Memcached – our perspective

Date: February 15, 2011
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By Scott Barnett

I just happened to be in California last week when Membase and CouchOne announced their merger.  First, this is excellent news for the NoSQL movement, and it seems happy times at the new Couchbase.  I happened to be in Palo Alto when I saw Bob’s blog, so I wandered over to Tied House and shared a few pints with the folks.  I had a chance to meet Bob and several members of the Membase team (Melinda, Perry and of course James who could not wipe the smile off his face!).  I also had a chance to meet Damien (and his lovely wife) from the CouchOne team, and we got serenaded with a new merger song which was penned at the party.  There were also several folks from companies that were using NoSQL in their environments (including one guy whose name I have forgotten (sorry!), but I do remember he worked in the same building as Membase but was using MongoDB for their application!  Shame :-) .  I met folks from Facebook, Canonical, Battery Ventures among others – it’s always great to feel the Valley vibe.

Beyond drinks and laughing, there was cause for real celebration. Both the Membase and Couch folks are seeing significant traction, and they had some great positioning in mind for the combined company. The combined ability to do caching, clustering, with a document database is the consolidation we predicted would happen in the NoSQL market.  CouchOne’s positioning with mobile gives them yet another growing channel for usage of Web and cloud applications where performance (and not transactions) are paramount.

Of course, we feel that this makes ClearStone’s positioning even more important as the leading APM tool for NoSQL – developers and operations will need tools that provide deep visibility into the NoSQL “stack”, which more often than not includes Couchbase, Membase or Memcached, as well as stats, correlation and relationship-mapping with the other tiers such as RDBMS, Web, Application, System, Network, etc., etc.

So, while we just released 5.0 Beta with Management Packs for Memcached stats and performance optimization and Membase, we will be adding support for CouchOne/Couchbase as they expose more monitoring capabilities.  In fact, 5.0 comes with a RESTful API that allows developers to build their own Management Packs, so if somebody wants to take a crack at the first Couchbase adapter for ClearStone, we’re ready for you!!

Congratulations again to both the Membase and CouchOne teams, and best wishes for continued success.

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