Monthly Archives: July 2015

CouchDB Weekly News, July 30, 2015

Major Discussions

[NEWS] Open Sourcing Cloudant Search {see thread) and Cloudant Search is Open Source now! (see thread)

IBM Cloudant announced to be “Open-Sourcing CouchDB Search Integration with Lucene”! This means, Cloudant open sourced the Search Stack that is powering the Cloudant Search features, which “consists of two repositories, Dreyfus, written in Erlang and Clouseau as a Scalang project that uses Lucene. Dreyfus is compatible with the new clustering features of CouchDB and makes use of them. It establishes links between the VMs/nodes to get the results from the shards before merging them as the final result which is returned to the user. For details how it works under the hood see this document.”

The CouchDB community happily discusses, how to optionally integrate the two projects as part of the ASF.

[2.0] Replication Issues (see thread)

While trying to upgrade a database from 1.6.1 to 2.0.0/master/0c579b98 and Jan listed a number of issues. Help is greatly appreciated with those! (See list of issues in the thread). Replication is running on 2.0, pulling from 1.6.1 over the EC2 internal ip address. One issue has already been fixed.

Hide all _all_docs and _changes (see thread)

A user wants to disable the ‘_all_docs’ feature in general, or ‘_all_docs’/ ‘and _changes’ for only specific databases, to prevent a user from seeing a list of all documents, the latter of which is not possible. It was advised to ensure that only wanted parts of the API are available and to consider using a reverse proxy, like nginx.

Using _active_tasks to track continuous replication status (see thread)

A user tries to find a way to know whether a document has been effectively replicated (in continuous mode) to a remote CouchDB, with a minimum of network requests. Two approaches have been suggested, one of which is getting the document ‘local_seq’ on the source side and watch the replication status on ‘_active_tasks’ until the completed sequence, ‘checkpointed_source_seq’, is equal to the document’s one.

Basic user cannot acces _users view (see thread)

Here a user wants to know how to allow ‘basic users’ in CouchDB 1.4.0 (without user or admin roles defined) to access ‘_users’ design document in order to call some view (when users have a ‘group’-property) and only get users of their group. It was indicated to take the security section about User’s Public Information into concern.

Updating lost user passwords (see thread)

The user@ mailing list was asked, if it is possible to make a user privileged (not an admin), to permit make changes to other ‘_user documents’, such as password changes. The answer to this is, that it is currently not possible, as only admins can edit other user’s ‘_users docs’.

Releases in the CouchDB Universe

Opinions and other News in the CouchDB Universe

Use Cases, Questions and Answers

Stack Overflow:

no public answer yet (Stack Overflow):

For more new questions and answers about CouchDB, see these search results.

Get involved!

If you want to get into working on CouchDB:

  • We have an infinite number of open contributor positions on CouchDB. Submit a pull request and join the project!
  • Do you want to help us with the work on the new CouchDB website? Get in touch on our new website mailing list and join the website team! – www@couchdb.apache.org
  • The CouchDB advocate marketing programme is just getting started. Join us in CouchDB’s Advocate Hub!
  • CouchDB has a new wiki. Help us move content from the old to the new one!
  • Can you help with Web Design, Development or UX for our Admin Console? No Erlang skills required! – Get in touch with us.
  • Do you want to help moving the CouchDB docs translation forward? We’d love to have you in our L10n team! See our current status and languages we’d like to provide CouchDB docs in on this page. If you’d like to help, don’t hesitate to contact the L10n mailing list on l10n@couchdb.apache.org or ping Andy Wenk (awenkhh on IRC).

We’d be happy to welcome you on board!

Events

Job opportunities for people with CouchDB skills

Time to relax!

  • “Just recently I spent a week doing support work for an application while my coworker was on vacation, reminding me yet again how much I learn from it. Since this was the first time I’d been involved with the app, I learned about the ways our users were getting tripped up, and saw pitfalls which I may never have thought about otherwise.” – Developing Empathy
  • “Much like what is said about including accessibility in your design, it doesn’t have to be extra work to make your culture sober-friendly, and it will improve everyone’s experience as a byproduct. Hold events at places other than bars – consider venues that don’t serve alcohol… When you focus on alcohol as the main activity, such as meeting in a bar, it becomes a barrier to participation for those hoping to refrain from alcohol.” – The UX of Alcohol Abuse: Reflections on a Year of Sobriety
  • “… the requirement to use a real name violates the rights, enshrined in German law, to use a pseudonym, while requests for digital copies of an official photo ID also contradict the passport and ID card law. In addition, he said that “the unauthorised modification of the pseudonym … blatantly violated the right to informational self-determination and constitutes a deliberate infringement of the Data Protection Act”.” – Germany fights Facebook over real names policy
  • “Organizations interested in hiring more diverse candidates need not lower their hiring bar; instead, they should raise the bar and create an interview process that takes a more rigorous, research-based approach to hiring.” – Want to Hire More Diverse People? Raise Your Bar.
  • “hen we meet people who are deaf, we can’t see what is physically wrong with them, but we believe them when they say they can’t hear us. Why don’t we believe people with other disabilities?” – Human Operating Systems
  • “As a Black female CS major at Stanford, I hate walking around the halls of the Gates Computer Science Building.” – No, I Am Not Lost, A Black woman’s experience in the Stanford Computer Science Major
  • “There was always going to be a cis white woman on stage (me), which meant that if I didn’t pay attention, these “all women” panels might have reinforced other hierarchies. In the initial list of speakers I wanted to invite, I noticed that a significant number of them speak openly about their queerness, trans identity, or race.” – How I Organized a Series of Six Panels on Technology with Only Women Speaking

… and also in the news

  • “…what’s written in Erlang that’s blown your socks off? – “…honestly CouchDB is still just too cool” (@adron and @KielanLemons via twitter)

CouchDB Weekly News, July 23, 2015

Major Discussions

Windows build failing on couch_ejson_compare.c (see thread)

As reported in the previous Weekly News, there was a problem with the Windows build blocked by khash NIF (see thread). Now it has been tried to revert to the old-style ets approach on Windows, conditionally using khash only on *NIX. The first go on @wohali’s Windows build went well up to compilation of couch_ejson_compare.c. The PR awaits a +1 from a *nix person before merging.

Optimizing chunked transfer-encoding and the impact on clients (see thread)

It has been discussed how to deal with the chunked transfer-encoding capability of HTTP/1.1 to stream _all_docs, _changes, _view and similar responses to clients, that CouchDB uses. As it is more efficient to coalescent multiple rows into a chunk and yields throughput improvements, this change also bears the risk of breaking clients that have been organised on sending single rows-per-chunk. (More details on this topic can be found in COUCHDB-2724 and associated Pull Requests). Several options have been analysed and discussed.

High CPU after loading 15K documents (see thread)

While monitoring CouchDB, a user is concerned that the CPU keeps around 10-12% of the time from the erlang processes and wants to find out, why it takes CPU time, when only a new document is added to the DB each 5-6 minutes and there are only few read requests.

npm releases and ASF releases (see thread)

Some questions regarding npm releases and the ASF/ASF releases and reposting them, came up in a former discussion (Welcome nano to the ASF), and have been re-addressed: “How do we handle npm releases? Currently Nuno Job, Pedro Teixeira and me have write access on npmjs.com. This needs to be changed so we maybe can have a CouchDB account? Also, how does the Apache release procedure work for npm packages?”

An approach to automate releases, maybe with the help of semantic-release, was suggested.

[couchrest] (see thread)

A pull request, “Persistent Connections and Streaming”, for the CouchRest gem includes a few, possibly breaking, API changes. The change boils down to replacing RestClient with HTTPClient which adds support for:

  • Persistent HTTP connections
  • Built-in streaming

You’re invited to help with feedback to the beta (version 2.0.0.beta1), before a final version will be released.

Releases in the CouchDB Universe

Opinions and other News in the CouchDB Universe

CouchDB Use Cases, Questions and Answers

  • Use Case: CouchDB Statistics: A CouchDB backend for the core Statistics module
  • Qusetion: No CouchDB filter parameter working with CoachDB and Dreamfactory, is this normal? Answer:CouchDB doesn’t have a filter language. One needs NoSQL with traditional SQL-like filter arguments.

Stack Overflow:

no public answer yet (Stack Overflow):

For more new questions and answers about CouchDB, see these search results.

PouchDB Use Cases, Questions and Answers (PouchDB)

Stack Overflow:

For more new questions and answers about PouchDB, see these search results.

Get involved!

If you want to get into working on CouchDB:

  • We have an infinite number of open contributor positions on CouchDB. Submit a pull request and join the project!
  • Do you want to help us with the work on the new CouchDB website? Get in touch on our new website mailing list and join the website team! – www@couchdb.apache.org
  • The CouchDB advocate marketing programme is just getting started. Join us in CouchDB’s Advocate Hub!
  • CouchDB has a new wiki. Help us move content from the old to the new one!
  • Can you help with Web Design, Development or UX for our Admin Console? No Erlang skills required! – Get in touch with us.
  • Do you want to help moving the CouchDB docs translation forward? We’d love to have you in our L10n team! See our current status and languages we’d like to provide CouchDB docs in on this page. If you’d like to help, don’t hesitate to contact the L10n mailing list on l10n@couchdb.apache.org or ping Andy Wenk (awenkhh on IRC).

We’d be happy to welcome you on board!

Events

Job opportunities for people with CouchDB skills

Time to relax!

  • “Last week I spoke at a new conference in Dublin called InspireFest: fresh perspectives on leadership, innovation and diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). It was a Stem conference with a difference – 75% of the speakers were women.” – Technology still has a problem with women – but change is in the air
  • ““Safe space”: it’s an idealistic term. It’s just not a case of “if you build it, they will come.” It takes some work to get a website to a place where users will feel welcome. I spoke to the founders and editors of Femsplain, CirclePlus.co, Black Girl Nerds and Autostraddle as well as the marketing head at Disqus and the founder of dating app Thurst, to find out what it takes to create safe spaces online.” – How Niche Sites are Building Safe Spaces and Better Communities
  • “Small modules favor library authors at the expense of library users. Because library authors typically have larger megaphones (more Twitter followers, more credibility on GitHub and Hacker News, etc), their voices are heard more often.” – Small modules: it’s not quite that simple
  • “Reem was one of several students invited to participate in the public forum with the chancellor last Wednesday, part of a discussion series called Living Well in Germany. ‘Politics is sometimes hard,’ the chancellor said…” – Tearful Moment With Merkel Turns Migrant Girl Into a Potent Symbol
  • “There’s a funny thing about survival. People think it’s about strength. About not surrendering. It twists your mind around, shines lights into the path ahead so you can find your way back, but it also blinds you, softly covering the spaces you can’t bear to see. Yet, still, here I am, surviving, all while feeling like I surrendered my whole life to surviving.” – On Wednesdays we wear our Battle Scars

… and also in the news