CouchDB
Apache CouchDB™ is designed for ease-of-use, both in development and operation. Built around web standards like HTTP and JSON and with operational best practices in mind, CouchDB is a first choice in modern application development. With its relentless focus on reliability and data protection, CouchDB is ready for your mission critical systems.
Whether you’ve just started thinking about it or are already working with CouchDB, there’s a bunch of things you might be worried about:
- Is it secure?
- Will it scale?
- Where are we going to run into problems?
- Can we make this faster?
- How do we make sure we’re moving in the right direction?
- Are we wasting time in development or hardware in production?
A few scenarios when Apache CouchDB comes in handy might be:
- You are already working on a new project, but do not have a NoSQL database yet.
- You are in the middle of working on a great project, but your current database does not meet your demands anymore since it’s been outgrown by your project. CouchDB grows with your project
- Your Data needs to be accessible at all times even, if catastrophes like hardware or power outages occur.
What are similar applications to CouchDB?
CouchDB and its family of replicating projects like PouchDB, Cloudant and Couchbase Mobile are the only Open Source alternative to systems like Apple’s iCloud, Amazon’s Cognito Mobile Sync, Facebook’s Parse, Google’s Firebase and Microsoft’s Azure Offline Sync for Mobile Services. These are great solutions, but they all exhibit some form of vendor lock-in. In this offline-first Backend as a Service model, CouchDB and its family are your only truly open option.
What is NoSQL and why do we like it so much?
NoSQL was developed with the rise of the internet as a response to the growing demand of big data storage, the necessity for agility and the ability to grow while staying online, which is a requirement for real-time applications. A few other terms to classify NoSQL would be: non-relational database, cloud database or Big Data database. CouchDB on its end can be categorized as a document oriented database.
What we treasure in NoSQL is its scalability, fault tolerance and availability, which makes it the high performance alternative to relational databases (RDBMS e.g.MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database).