Racklabs - Thoughts on the Hosted IT Revolution

A CouchDB Tech Talk with Jan Lehnardt

Posted by Bill Boebel, CTO, Mailtrust

On Monday, March 17th (St Patrick’s Day), Jan Lehnardt, a contributor to the open source CouchDB project, will be dropping by the Mailtrust office in Blacksburg, VA. Jan will be giving a presentation on Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB.

This Racklabs event is open to anyone in the community that wants to learn why CouchDB is a super-duper thingymajong (Jan’s own words).

When: Monday, March 17, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
Where: Mailtrust, 775 University City Blvd, Blacksburg VA
RSVP: techtalk@mailtrust.com …otherwise you don’t get any pizza!

From the Virginia Tech campus, take the Tom’s Creek B bus to the first University City Blvd stop. The bus runs every 10 minutes.

Summary of the talk:

Most data is not inherently relational. CouchDB takes this idea and provides a data storage model that easily accommodates modern applications’ needs. Instead of doing the equivalent of manual memory management in a database, splitting all data up carefully in predefined, inflexible schemata, CouchDB stores records of data in independent ‘Documents’. They can be easily replicated to other instances of CouchDB for high availability and load balancing reasons.

Efficient retrieval of Documents is realized with map-reduce based ‘Views’. They allow aggregating and reporting as well as defining sub-sets of documents and expression of relations where needed. JavaScript is used to define Views and JSON to transport data.

Traditional database systems get pushed to their limits by modern web applications. The practices applied to gain speed and availability work often against the original design of a database. Common techniques like denormalization, partitioning and replication are central to CouchDB. Further, CouchDB is implemented in Erlang/OTP, a language and platform that is targeted at highly concurrent and fault tolerant systems.

This presentation explains the mind-set behind the Open Source database CouchDB. It explains scenarios where CouchDB’s features provide elegant solutions to problems where traditional database systems struggle. Even without knowing much about data storage, you will gain some insight about what is possible.