Jan Lehnardt posted a long reply to my comments on the State of CouchDB. I thought many would benefit from promoting it to a real post (with Jan’s permission). Before handing it over to Jan, I want to thank him for taking the time to clarify some of the things. I also want to be clear that I still stand by all my comments. Now, to Jan Lehnardt:

Hey Alex,

you are of course correct and I stand by my post. Let me explain the discrepancy.

The post is a summary of my notes for my opening talk of CouchDB Conf that I ran in Berlin in January. The target audience are the people in the actual audience. There are people who build CouchDB, people who help out with CouchDB, people who use CouchDB and a few people who want to know what’s up with CouchDB. By and large though, these are what I’d call “CouchDB People”.

You interpret the post as if it were for a general public audience and it is entirely my fault making that not more clear in the opening of my post.

To your notes:

• Confusion: spot on, our bad, mistakes were made, it’s gonna take time to get sorted.

• passive aggressive style: sorry if that read this way, it was definitely not intended. It was to highlight that there are people who absolutely love what CouchDB does. It isn’t a statement about quantities, which your note about “your numbers” implies. I’m not interested in discussing numbers, but I understand that people have turned away for good reasons. — Consider being an enthusiast, and you go to a conference of like-minded people and the project lead gives a talk and says, “people like you are passionate”. “Fuck yeah I am passionate” you think, or say, and get a good vibe going at the conference. (For CouchDB fans, it was really good times).

• list of features: good stuff on there, but none of that matters until it ships. This is for people on the inside to see what we are working towards and get them rallied up to help and contribute. You assessment that the “real” features are in the gist is misguided, but I chalk that up to differing opinions, no harm done.

• *ouch projects: hell yeah I am excited to finally fulfil the original promise of CouchDB from fucking six years ago. The thing to highlight here isn’t that “boo a bunch of things that rhyme with ouch”, but that we are starting to see a production-ready ecosystem of a true open source data sync solution that bloody works. — I agree with you that branding/communication is key here, and that there is a lot to be done.

• facts matter / “came out on top: nope”: again spot on, but this is where I really wished you had given me shout before posting this. Maybe next time, you should still have my number. Your assessment that we did not come out on top is completely correct, if you look at it from a general public point of view. It’d be odd to deny the facts. But again, this isn’t meant as a post that says “hey everyone, look how great CouchDB is doing”, because a) CouchDB isn’t and b) the intended audience is not everybody. What I did meant to point out that the open source project is aware of the challenges it is facing and is doing its utmost to set everything up so things can be resolved. We spent twelve months in relative obscurity preparing many things that are starting to see the light of day now, but most of it in the future. Only when we delivered on all of that, we can look at the facts again and see how CouchDB is doing. I am confident that it’ll look good, but there is a lot to be done until then. The “coming out on top” is a comment on that the core of the project and its community are strong, and that we are in a position to turn the boat back to former and further glory and not that we are somehow deceived by our own filter bubble and believe that all is well when it isn’t.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain things. I think your assessment of CouchDB in general of the past years has been spot on and your current criticisms are also accurate and well received, it’s just that you got the intended audience for my post wrong, which I didn’t make very clear to the casual observer.

Original title and link: The State of CouchDB - Jan Lehnardt’s Comment (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

I’m saving the current list of CouchDB Future Features so I can check it back in 6 months¹:

Original title and link: CouchDB Future Feature List (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

The list of releases I wanted to post about has been growing fast these last couple of weeks, so instead of waiting leaving it to Here it is (in no particular order¹):

1. (Jan.2nd) Cassandra 1.2 — announcement on DataStax’s blog. I’m currently learning and working on a post looking at what’s new in Cassandra 1.2.
2. (Jan.10th) Apache Pig 0.10.1 — Hortonworks wrote about it
3. (Jan.10th) DataStax Community Edition 1.2 and OpsCenter 2.1.3 — DataStax announcement
4. (Jan.10th) CouchDB 1.0.4, 1.1.2, and 1.2.1 — releases fixing some security vulnerabilities

5. (Jan.11th) MongoDB 2.3.2 unstable — announcement. This dev release includes support for full text indexing. For more details you can check:

   • MongoDB Full Text Search Explained and MongoDB Text Search Tutorial
   • Full text search in MongoDB: details about supported languages and queries
   • Indexing a Markdown blog using MongoDB full text indexing
   • Short demo of MongoDB text search and hashed shard keys
     
   • (Jan.12th) Apache HBase 0.94.4 — announcement and release notes
   • (Jan.14th) Apache Hive 0.10.0: Hortonworks’s post about it
   • (Jan.15th) Hortonworks Data Platform 1.2 featuring Apache Amabari — official PR announcement
   • (Jan.16th) Redis 2.6.9 — release notes
   • (Jan.16th) HyperDex 1.0RC1 — no docs
   • (Jan.16th) Klout’s Brickhouse — announcement:

   […] an open source project extending Hadoop and Hive with a collection of useful user-defined-functions. Its aim is to make the Hive Big Data developer more productive, and to enable scalable and robust dataflows.

Original title and link: 11 Interesting Releases From the First Weeks of January (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Calvin Metcalf writes about PouchDB, which is neither TouchDB nor CouchDB:

Before we discus PouchDB we’re going to need to talk about CouchDB which Pouch is based on. […] So one of the issues with CouchDB is that Erlang…well lets just say people have mixed feelings about it, which lead to pretty quickly, CouchDB compatible Databases, Big Couch from Cloudant which you can cluster, TouchDB is a version written in Objective-C targeting embedded apps, and then we have PouchDB.

Hurry as you may run out of names: AouchDB, BouchDB, DouchDB, EouchDB, FouchDB, GouchDB, HouchDB, IouchDB, JouchDB, KouchDB, LouchDB, MouchDB, NouchDB, QouchDB, RouchDB, SouchDB, UouchDB, VouchDB, WouchDB, XouchDB, YouchDB, ZouchDB. For special requests we could expand to using unicode and emoji.

Original title and link: CouchDB, TouchDB, PouchDB… (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Catching up after almost two weeks offline is no easy task, but I hope I’ll not miss any important events, releases, or posts. But if I do, please email me.

Cassandra 1.0.9: Maintenance Release

The complete change notes for Cassandra 1.0.9 are here:

• improve index sampling performance (CASSANDRA-4023)
• always compact away deleted hints immediately after handoff (CASSANDRA-3955)
• delete hints from dropped ColumnFamilies on handoff instead of erroring out (CASSANDRA-3975)
• add CompositeType ref to the CLI doc for create/update column family (CASSANDRA-3980)
• Avoid NPE during repair when a keyspace has no CFs (CASSANDRA-3988)
• Fix division-by-zero error on get_slice (CASSANDRA-4000)
• don’t change manifest level for cleanup, scrub, and upgradesstables operations under LeveledCompactionStrategy (CASSANDRA-3989, 4112)
• fix race leading to super columns assertion failure (CASSANDRA-3957)
• ensure that directory is selected for compaction for user-defined tasks and upgradesstables (CASSANDRA-3985)
• allow custom types in CLI’s assume command (CASSANDRA-4081)
• fix totalBytes count for parallel compactions (CASSANDRA-3758)
• fix intermittent NPE in get_slice (CASSANDRA-4095)
• remove unnecessary asserts in native code interfaces (CASSANDRA-4096)
• Fix EC2 snitch incorrectly reporting region (CASSANDRA-4026)
• Shut down thrift during decommission (CASSANDRA-4086)

• Merged from 0.8: Fix ConcurrentModificationException in gossiper (CASSANDRA-4019)

• Pig

  • support Counter ColumnFamilies (CASSANDRA-3973)
  • Composite column support (CASSANDRA-3684)

• CQL

  • fix NPE on invalid CQL delete command (CASSANDRA-3755)
  • Validate blank keys in CQL to avoid assertion errors (CASSANDRA-3612)

Apache Hadoop User Impersonation vulnerability

This vulnerability discovered by Cloudera’s Aaron T. Myers affects Hadoop’s versions 0.20.203.0, 0.20.204.0, 0.20.205.0, 1.0.0 to 1.0.1, and 0.23.0 to 0.23.1 where Kerberos is enabled. Complete details available here.

CouchDB 1.2.0

This is the first important release after the start of the year CouchDB hubbub with Damien Katz and Couchbase. The new version is a major release in itself deserving its own post: CouchDB 1.2.0: Performance, Security, API, Core and Replication Improvements.

Riak 1.1.2: Stabilization release

Just a maintenance release in the Riak 1.1 series. Complete release notes here.

Original title and link: NoSQL Releases and Announcements (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)