16 October 2009, 12:19

First beta of Apache CouchDB

CouchDB in a nutshell.
Source: couchdb,apache.org The CouchDB developers have released version 0.10, the first beta version of the document-oriented database that has "relax" as its motto. Written in Erlang , the Apache Software Foundation's distributed database is controlled via HTTP and a JSON API. CouchDB data is stored as key-value pairs, and new keys can be defined at any time without having to adapt the structure of the data already stored - the database is schema free. Queries can be formulated using a Map Reduce API.

The new version 0.10 simplifies configuration by distributing its configuration files across several directories. The build process for creating the database from the source code has been simplified and database performance has been improved; replication and file format have become more robust. The developers also made several changes to the API.

CouchDB is the basis of Canonical's Ubuntu One service that provides every user of the forthcoming Ubuntu 9.10 with 2 Gbytes of free cloud storage for backups, data synchronisation and data exchange. The service requires an instance of CouchDB to run on every Ubuntu system that uses it. The W3C's WebSimpleDB API working draft developed by, among others, Mozilla, Oracle and CouchDB, defines a data storage API for web applications that is very similar to the CouchDB API.