Learning to Relax - CouchDB for beginners

In his presentation, Alan Hoffman, Co-Founder of Cloudant (hosted CouchDB) gives us an introduction to CouchDB. So what is CouchDB?

• Apache Project
• Written in Erlang
• Schema-free document database management system (like MongoDB)
• Robust, Concurrent and Fault-Tolerant
• RESTful JSON API
• Custom Persistent Views using MapReduce
• Bi-directional Increment Replication

So a couple of tidbits about CouchDB that I found interesting.

• Each document has a revision and under certain replication environments conflicts can occur
• Documents can have binary attachments
• Unlike some other RDBMS systems there is nothing to repair if the server crashes, just restart the server and you are back up and online
• Replication can be performed with one-click
• Multiple replication setups are available: Master-Slave, Master-Master and Robust Multi-Master
• Does not support ad-hoc queries, this is by design
• 1.0 is just around the corner

CouchDB Lounge is an open source proxy-based partitioning and clustering solution. It uses a combinatino of a smart and dumb proxy to add partitioning and cluster to CouchDB. Another option, which is being developed by Cloudant, is Open Cloudant which essentially tries to duplicate ring clustering like what is found in Amazon's Dynamo. According the slides this solution is "Coming soon to github near you" so keep a look out.