Join us Thursday January 19 at 6:30 PM at our brand new Headquarters (aka Fort Awesome). Join and RSVP here.
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Join us Thursday January 19 at 6:30 PM at our brand new Headquarters (aka Fort Awesome). Join and RSVP here.
]]>Simple Fast Elastic.
That's pretty much it. We make it very simple to get started, we are extremely fast (and getting faster), and we really are "web scale", with the ability to add and remove machines from a cluster to rapidly scale your capacity to your workload.
The Membase product was very fast and scalable, but a bit too simple, with no reporting capability or cross-datacenter replication capability.
The CouchDB product has a lot of features, but is too slow, unable to keep up with high loads and inability scale-out on it's own.
The combination of the 2 will hit a sweet spot to allow developers to quickly get their apps up and running, along with the reliability, speed and low cost that make running it in production cheap and worry free.
Our 2.0 product is coming soon, adding CouchDB style views and reporting with a nifty trick for extremely fast failover while maintaining full coherency with the underling distributed data storage (we are calling it our B-Superstar index). We'll of course have lighting fast reads (same as Memcached) but also very fast durable writes. For 2kb docs, we are currently getting sustained random insert/updates rates of 25k writes/sec, fully durable, with compaction in background so it can go all day and all night. We've got some more write work coming soon which we are hoping will give us another performance boost too before 2.0. Stay tuned.
And so right now the focus is on the features and customers that pay, a thing that allow us to build a real sustainable business. And that's REAL DAMN IMPORTANT. It's not enough to build some cool technology, not enough to build a community of excited technologist. You need to cross the chasm and build a real business. A business that provides support, training, documentation and of course a reliable product. A business you can call up when you have difficultly upgrading from an old version, or are getting some weird error you've never seen before at 3am. A business you know will be around to support you for years to come.
And so while we focus on the features and customers that most quickly make us a viable business (and it's growing fast), we are still looking to build the features and technology to expand our use cases and, get customers and developers excited. Future versions are planned to have full CouchDB compatible replication technology, with the ability to support all sorts of mobile and embedded databases, such as our new TouchDB projects for iOS and Android. So with Couchbase you can have fast, scalable database in the cloud that also supports the offline use of thousands, or millions of apps on devices that drop in and out of internet connectivity, and can sync when connected but still completely usable when disconnected.
That's some cool shit. Simple Fast Elastic. And Reliable. And Mobile. That's why Couchbase.
]]>Huh? So what about Apache CouchDB? Well, that's a great project. I founded it, coded the earliest versions almost completely myself, I've spent a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears on it. I'm very proud of it and the impact it's had. And now I, and the Couchbase team, are mostly moving on. It's not that we think CouchDB isn't awesome. It's that we are creating the successor to it: Couchbase Server. A product and project with similar capabilities and goals, but more faster, more scalable, more customer and developer focused. And definitely not part of Apache.
With Apache CouchDB, much of the focus has been around creating a consensus based, developer community that helps govern and move the project forward. Apache has done, and is doing a good job of that. But for us, it's no longer enough. CouchDB was something I created because I thought an easy to use, peer based, replicating document store was something the world would find useful. And it proved a lot of the ideas were possible and useful and it's been successful beyond my wildest ambitions. But if I had it all to do again, I'd do many things different.
If it sounds like I'm saying Apache was a mistake, I'm not. Apache was a big part in the success of CouchDB, without it CouchDB would not have enjoyed the early success it did. But in my opinion it's reached a point where the consensus based approach has limited the competitiveness of the project. It's not personal, it's business.
And now, as it turns out, I have a chance to do it all again, without the pain of starting from scratch. Building on the previous Apache CouchDB and Membase projects, throwing out what didn't work, and strengthening what does, and advancing great technologies to make something that is developer friendly, high performance, designed for mission critical deployment and mobile integration, and can move faster and more responsively to users and customers needs than a community based project.
Apache CouchDB, as project and community, is in fine shape. And many of us at Couchbase are still contributing back to it. But the future, the one I'm pushing forward on, is Couchbase Server.
And what is my part in building Couchbase? Right now I'm focusing on getting Couchbase 2.0 ready for serious production use. I'm once again an engineer and coder, back in the trenches, designing and writing code, reviewing code and designs, helping other engineers and solving tough problems. And I'm dead serious about making it the easiest, fastest and most reliable NoSQL database. Easy for developers to use, easy to deploy, reliable on single machines or large clusters, and fast as hell. We are building something you can put your mission critical, customer facing business data on, and not feel like you're running a dirty hack.
Soon, to work more closely with the team (and get rid of my nasty Oakland commute), I'll be relocating my family to the Mountain View area. Shit just got real!
And I'm really excited about the work we've got in the pipeline. We are moving more and more of the core database in C/C++, while still using many of the concurrency and reliability design principles we've proven with the Erlang codebase. And Erlang is still going to be part of the product as well, particularly with cluster management, but most of the performance sensitive portions will be moving to over C code. Erlang is still a great language, but when you need top performance and low level control, C is hard to beat.
Anyway, there so much to talk about, to much for one blog post. One of my New Years resolutions is to blog more, and I've got a ton of interesting things to talk about. The trials of tribulations of building a startup and an engineering culture. What's wrong (and right) with Erlang. Bringing forth UnQL. TouchDB for Mobile. And yes, we'll still interoperate with Apache CouchDB and Memcached. But the future is Couchbase.
Ride with me.
Edit
As J. Chris Anderson notes in the comments, Couchbase is completely open source and Apache licensed:
Everything Couchbase does is open source, we have 2 github pages that are very active:https://github.com/couchbaselabs
Probably the most fun place to jump into development is the code review: http://review.couchbase.org/
Let me clarify, if you like Apache CouchDB, stick with it. I'm working on something I think you'll like a lot better. If not, well, there's still Apache CouchDB.
]]>More info here: http://www.couchbase.com/company/jobs Or you can send your resume and qualifications to me here: damien@couchbase.com
]]>Hello! I would say that mobile sync is a deceptively hard problem to get all the nice properties you want. I suggest you look at how Couchbase replication works and try to duplicate it, and ideally, try to interoperate with it.
Some of the properties you probably want:
Incremental replication - The ability to stop and restart replication and not lose all your progress. Vital in a mobile environment where connections are slow and flaky.
Concurrency -You want to be able to use the local and the remote the databases while it's getting sync'd/replicated, no global locking. So the app is usable at all times and syncing in the background.
Conflict management - You need plan for how you'll deal with and manage edit conflicts.
Partial replication - Having replicas that only hold a interesting subset of other replicas. Important when sharing a large data set, but mobile clients only need a portion of it.
Ad hoc Topology - Couchbase supports ad hoc topology, any machine can sync with any other machine without prior knowledge. This is much more flexible than a single centralized sync point or fixed topology. Though many deployments will only need a single sync point, often new ones will need to be added.
Schema upgrade - Couchbase is schemaless, so it's easy to add new field/properties without breaking things. If using a schema, it's difficult to upgrade remote clients when they have new data in older schemas, etc.
Security - the ability to refuse updates if the come from unauthorized sources.
Anyway, Couchbase and CouchDB has worked out these problems and is successful in production on millions of machines. It's not the only way to build a sync scheme, but it's one of the most successful.
-Damien
]]>The next one is in Portland in just a couple days on June 27 and 28! If you're in Portland for OSBridge, or you are in the area, you should definitely sign up.
http://www.couchbase.com/couchdb-training/portland-june-2011
Also, if you're in NYC this summer and want to learn about Membase Server, we'll be doing a class on July 11 and 12th.
http://www.couchbase.com/membase-training/nyc-july-2011
We only have a limited number of seats so it's important to sign up ASAP.
]]>CouchConf is the only conference dedicated to all things Couch. This one-day event is for any developer who wants to take a deeper dive into Couchbase technology, learn where it's headed and build really cool stuff.
damien@couchbase.com
]]>It's not too late to sign up for the remaining 3 cities on the Couchbase Training World Tour: Austin, London and Berlin.
]]>And the idea that you fully understand your own code is a bit suspect, too. My code's all nice and fast until somebody passes me in a POST request with a million keys, or decides to upload a 10GB file where I was expecting a 5KB file and I run a hash algorithm over it, or I accidentally use way more memory than I expected and push the system into swap, or any number of other things like that. My life would be a lot easier if my code never did anything I didn't expect.
I keep wondering where Node fits in a production environment and who writes the code that powers it.
]]>Claire was so inspired she wrote a song about it:
]]>A little background, I met James Phillips, the co-founder of Membase, for the first time in December. I'd heard a little about Membase up to that point, but I was most impressed with some of their high profile users. For example, Membase is a key part of Zynga, where giving millions of users a fast, low latency experience is critical.
Membase has been targeting large scale mission critical apps, being able to scale out quickly and support millions of users, and getting impressive traction. They'd been going after a very specific pain point, a completely different part of the market than what we were targeting. They've focused on performance and scalability and exploiting all the power and memory available on modern servers. Simple, Fast, Elastic.
At CouchOne we've been focusing on very different problems: mobile, sync and offline use cases. We make it easy to build applications that travel with you, allowing you access to your important data no matter the network conditions. Slow and unreliable connectivity means many businesses can't rely on the cloud for mission critical apps, all their data is gone when their network is down. But with Couch powered apps on your phone, tablet, putting data directly on the machines at the edge of the network, you have your apps and data with you at all times and safely backed up to the cloud.
What James had is the vision to see the great fit between the two companies. While independently we were both doing very well, we both have a lot of growing to do yet. And amazingly, the direction Membase needed to grow, we were already doing very well. And in the direction we needed to grow, Membase was already doing very well. Not only were the part of the stack we were focusing different and complementary, but the way we built out our teams was different and complementary. I'm not sure we could have planned it any better, and we didn't plan it at all!
And so I'm thrilled to announce Couchbase, a merging of both our companies and our technology!
Technologically, we'll be joining the products together to create a high volume, low latency, elastic clustered Couchbase server system. A Couch that's Simple, Fast, Elastic with all the reliability and power of CouchDB. We'll also continue to support the Membase API, for both backwards compatibility and it's performance advantages over HTTP. We will be the only solution out there that can scale to Zynga sized workloads and down to phones and tablets and everything in between, supporting millions of users and keeping everything in sync.
For existing CouchDB users, we will fully support CouchDB's HTTP API with all its associated benefits: seamless integration with other HTTP based infrastructure, a universally supported, human-readable protocol and direct-browser access just to name a few.
Together as Couchbase, we'll have the fastest, most scalable (both scale up and scale down) NoSQL solution. We will become the standard storage for mobile devices, and the standard server technology for syncing them all together. Our unified solution will dramatically simplify your technology stack and maintenance for building fast responsive apps that scale to millions of users, and also scaling down to phones so people can work and play even when not connected to the network.
My role at Couchbase will be CTO, overseeing the technical direction of the company. Dustin Sallings will be the chief architect. Bob Weiderhold will be CEO and co-founder James Phillips will continue to be product-oriented maniac :) CouchOne co-founders Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt will take roles to lead our mobile efforts and to work with our developers and community.
What's in it for you?
It's all upside! In the short-term we'll be able to provide a much better developer and support experience for both for CouchOne and Membase technologies, and move the development speed ahead much faster. The long term benefits are that CouchDB users will acquire the high performance, high scale easy-fast-elastic capabilities of Membase, while Membase users will acquire CouchDB's indexing features (map/reduce views, lucene, R-Tree GeoCouch), replication, reliability, and an easy path to mobile.
This is hot stuff! 2011 is the year of Couchbase!
]]>WSJ Venture Capital Dispatch: Music Video For Database Start-Up? That's How CouchOne Rolls
]]>He's a young guy with a lot of talent and lots of real world experience designing and creating web apps. Most recently he's created Arik, cool blog software built on PHP and CouchDB.
He'll be in Bay area (my house to be exact!) Oct. 23-27 for some job interviews. Contact him before he's all booked up!
Resume: http://www.madisonwilliams.net/resume.php
Blog: http://www.madisonwilliams.net/