Faster Apache CouchDB
Written by Kay Ewbank   
Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Apache has announced the release of CouchDB 1.2.0. It brings lots of improvements, some of which mean apps written for older versions of CouchDB will no longer work.

According to the blog post from its developers, the changes start with improved performance and security. The performance is better because the developers have added a native JSON parser where the performance critical portions are implemented in C, so latency and throughput for all database and view operations is improved. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and for machines to parse and generate. The CouchDB team is using the yajl library for its JSON parser.

 

couchdblogo

 

The new version of CouchDB also has optional file compression for database and view index files, with all storage operations being passed through Google's snappy compressor. This means less data has to be transferred, so access is faster.

Alongside these headline changes for performance, the team has also made other changes that take the Erlang runtime system into account to improve concurrency when writing data to databases and view index files.

Security is the other area that has seen improvements, with a range of changes to make it much more secure to run CouchDB as a public database server for CouchApps. This is the area where the changes may well mean your existing apps don’t work with the new version, but as the team points out, it’s probably well worth the trouble of re-coding.

The changes mean that documents in the _users and _replication databases can now only be read by the respective authenticated user and administrators, rather than by everyone as was the case in earlier versions. Password hashes have also been improved in the sense that they are now calculated by CouchDB instead of the client.  OAuth secrets within the database and persistent authentication cookies are now supported by CouchDB.

Other improvements include a new replicator system that has been rewritten from scratch to be faster and more reliable, with a wider set of configuration choices to allow for better tuning for particular environments.

 

couchdblogo

More Information

Apache CouchDB 1.2.0 Release Notes

Full details of the changes

Download

Related Articles

NoSQL CouchDB gets boost 

 

espbook

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Google+, Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

Banner


Personal Picks For Holiday Gifts
29/11/2024

It's Black Friday, the traditional day to indulge in online shopping. Not every item that is included in my selection of gifts is subject to a promotional offer, but where they aren't you might be poi [ ... ]



pg_parquet - Postgres To Parquet Interoperability
28/11/2024

pg_parquet is a new extension by Crunchy Data that allows a PostgreSQL instance to work with Parquet files. With pg_duckdb, pg_analytics and pg_mooncake all of which can access Parquet files, is  [ ... ]


More News

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 25 April 2012 )