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What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

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Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#51

Post by cemerick »

rkalla wrote: post #12

A lot of this is the result of the confusion in the community, there is the CouchDB Apache project, then the CouchBase work and their own "Single Server" releases that don't necessarily map 1:1 to the Apache versions. Then there is the CouchBase "Couch Server" offering which, from what little I can tell, is membase + CouchDB and their CouchDB build, according to their docs, isn't 100% 1:1 with the Apache CouchDB buil…

The interesting thing about CouchDB is that it's actually more like an HTTP storage and query API/protocol than a particular database implementation.

As you've noted, there's lots of implementations and variants, platform targets and hosted services. What ties them all together is that you can point your CouchDB client library (or curl! :-P) at any of them, and be off and running.

While having a tip of the spear with a consistent message, canonical implementation and download, etc. is one approach (and I could certainly live with better messaging from certain places!), I think people are convinced enough by the merits of the CouchDB model to effectively route around the lack of that and some have produced fantastic (compatible / interoperable) alternatives.

(FWIW, I've been using CouchDB for a long time with a lot of apps and instances, but have been able to use all of them with Cloudant instead.)

Insofar as MongoDB's fate is tied to 10gen's, the distributed nature of the CouchDB ecosystem is actually working out quite well AFAICT.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#52

Post by peschkaj »

yxhuvud wrote: post #36
mark242 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couchbase offers 3 products -- Couchbase Server (which is Membase, with an instance of CouchDB for persistant storage). Couchbase Single Server (which is CouchDB plus Geocouch plus a few other addons). Couchbase Mobile (self-explanatory). My understanding is that version 3.0 will probably merge the Membase and Couchbase products into one, so you'll have Couchbase and Couchbase mobile. BigCouch is a separate product f…

Hmm. I thought Riak also had master-master replication.

It does. As does Cassandra.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#53

Post by wavephorm »

rdtsc wrote: post #37
wavephorm wrote: post #4

I'm not entirely surprised. CouchDB is very clunky and minimalist. And documentation is really, really horrible. The futon UI is a pain to use. I had to write my own library for nodejs because all the existing code I found was terribly written and poorly documented. It just goes on and on. And I like the technology, I persisted and eventually learned to be sort of proficient with CouchDB. But I doubt other people wil…

> The futon UI is a pain to use. Interesting I had quite the opposite experience. It found it quite a bit better than any other NoSQL database UIs. Someone even copied it for MongoDB and stuck it on top of it. Why do you think it was pain? And what NoSQL DB UIs have you found to be better and why?

Things like adding users, and restricting a database to particular users, was a nightmare to figure out.

When trying to enter a view, you need to quote and escape your code and put it all on one line. It's really bad, no novice would even know how to do this properly. I had to write my own little slash/escape tool to do it right.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#54

Post by timanglade »

CouchOne abandoned any sort of marketing effort around CouchDB long before they got acquired by Membase. Since then, they have focused their attention solely on marketing the Couchbase brand, with close to zero time spent evangelizing Apache CouchDB. The other CouchDB “vendor”, Cloudant (who I work for) never had much of a marketing budget, so we spent no time marketing CouchDB either (we focused on building and marketing our own products, open-source BigCouch and hosted Cloudant).

This situation did not catch us by surprise; I flagged this as a potential issue at Cloudant and had conversations about it with the CouchOne guys back in January 2011.

What you see here is just what happens to open-source technologies when nobody spends time evangelizing them — and when maybe, just maybe, they’re not hip enough to get self-sustaining traction. I love CouchDB to pieces and believe it's an immensely useful tool with great things in its future — but it has long stopped being cool, compared to the MongoDBs and Nodes of this world. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing… Strong communities are not built on shallow attraction.)

So yes, both vendors decided to focus their limited resources on advertising their own products (successfully & deservedly so, I would argue) but I think the success & money that phase brings in will undoubtedly be funneled back into even more evangelizing & involvement in Apache CouchDB. (I'm speaking for Cloudant at least, don’t know what Couchbase’s open-source plans are for Apache CouchDB.)

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#55

Post by pixelcort »

rkalla wrote: post #12

A lot of this is the result of the confusion in the community, there is the CouchDB Apache project, then the CouchBase work and their own "Single Server" releases that don't necessarily map 1:1 to the Apache versions. Then there is the CouchBase "Couch Server" offering which, from what little I can tell, is membase + CouchDB and their CouchDB build, according to their docs, isn't 100% 1:1 with the Apache CouchDB buil…

> I'd also point out that CouchDB's biggest feature, the must-have feature no other NoSQL repo besides RavenDB replicates, is the master-master replication. If you don't need that, your barrier to entry with the other NoSQL solutions is much easier/straight forward.

The other unique feature is incremental MapReduce. If you need to transform your mostly unchanging data in a way more complex than a mere attribute index, the ability for CouchDB to reuse parts of the last MapReduce operation is very convenient.

Of course, if you want to do any transormations beyond one set of map and reduce operations, you're on your own. I think only [Twister][1] does iterative MapReduce at the moment, although I'm not sure if it is incremental or not.

[1]: http://www.iterativemapreduce.org/

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#56

Post by sologoub »

The regional visualization is a bit weird. It shows Korea and Russia as the top regions searching for Mongo and CouchDB. US is not even on the list.

When you switch to look at US searches, Chinese is somehow far outpacing English... http://www.google.com/trends?q=MongoDB%2C+couchDB&ctab=0...

Seems like it's looking for the greatest difference between the two terms, as opposed to general popularity.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#57

Post by rdtsc »

wavephorm wrote: post #53
rdtsc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The futon UI is a pain to use. Interesting I had quite the opposite experience. It found it quite a bit better than any other NoSQL database UIs. Someone even copied it for MongoDB and stuck it on top of it. Why do you think it was pain? And what NoSQL DB UIs have you found to be better and why?

Things like adding users, and restricting a database to particular users, was a nightmare to figure out. When trying to enter a view, you need to quote and escape your code and put it all on one line. It's really bad, no novice would even know how to do this properly. I had to write my own little slash/escape tool to do it right.

I agree those are valid deficiencies. Some highlighting and code formatting for views would be good.

Maybe a plugin interface for other syntax parsers, since, for example we use a python view server instead of a JS one.

I am still wondering what NoSQL databases have a better admin UI. I feel that Futon is pretty good and was a factor in picking CouchDB over others.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#58

Post by rdtsc »

sqrt17 wrote: post #48
mumrah wrote: post #45

If we're comparing CouchDB's popularity to that of MongoDB's, it's simple - 10gen. 10gen has done a very good job generating lots of hype around their product. I believe they have people dedicated to this task (aka, evangelists). CouchBase on the other hand, has not done so well at this.

It's also that CouchDB is (or at least used to be) rather slow compared to MongoDB. 10gen sure has done a lot to keep MongoDB growing despite many people having their homework (or essential customer data, or...) eaten by MongoDB; so part of it probably is attributable to better publicity.

There is a reason they are fast. They didn't use to have durability. Think about that -- it is a database product that until the last version didn't have durability and its writes were not acknowledged with a response. If you store you data in memory and write it to disk sometimes, you can write very fast.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#59

Post by rdtsc »

mumrah wrote: post #45

If we're comparing CouchDB's popularity to that of MongoDB's, it's simple - 10gen. 10gen has done a very good job generating lots of hype around their product. I believe they have people dedicated to this task (aka, evangelists). CouchBase on the other hand, has not done so well at this.

And that hype turned me off. I have an allergic reaction to it. Especially when they were caught acknowledging they didn't have default durability for their writes. Then suddenly they removed their benchmarks from their site and made some comment about how data will be lost anyway, so it is not a big deal.

Re: What happened to CouchDB's popularity?

#60

Post by rdtsc »

mark242 wrote: post #8

Go to one of the http://www.couchbase.com/couchconf-world-tour CouchConf days and ask your question again. The San Francisco edition was exciting; anyone know how New York turned out?

Why not invest that time and effort in product features and development instead of marketing, hype, cons & webinars.

This is a database product, I feel that features, benchmarks, documentation, support and real use example would help more than a flashy marketing website.

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