Today we have an update on the growth in popularity of CouchDB from Joan Touzet.

Joan works with Neighbourhoodie Software as the head of CouchDB Support and she reports that for the last year or so, we’ve seen a steady increase in interest in CouchDB overall–more clients, more tickets, more prospects.

In investigating why this is so, here is what Joan derived:

The proof is in the surge of downloads. As Apache CouchDB PMC representative, I used the developer mailing list to share with the community the download figures for CouchDB binaries since late 1.6.1 days. You can view the graphs here. The first graph shows a surprising truth: the most popular download for CouchDB is the Windows installer, clocking in at nearly a quarter million downloads in the last 18 months! Taking Mac and Linux binaries into account, binary-only downloads account for >350,000 downloads in a year and a half. That’s quite a lot of people.

In terms of tickets, we wondered if so many were coming in because we were still riding the early adoption days of CouchDB 2.x. Maybe more customers were asking for help in transitioning from 1.6/1.7. A review of our customer communications put this idea to bed quickly. We had a couple of clients who definitely were adjusting to the new version, but most were interested in more complex topics, such as best practices when designing new Offline First applications.

One key area that people want to learn more about is the new clustering features. Initial deployment of these features was uneventful, but as people started approaching topics like growing or shrinking a cluster, or node replacements, they began reaching out to us as this is less common knowledge. As a consequence of these inquiries, our team put together new documentation around sharding, which is part of the new CouchDB 2.2.0 release, spearheaded by Diana Thayer. We hope this improvement to core CouchDB docs will help many of you get more comfortable with how to manage sharded databases.

So here we have it. CouchDB 2.x is booming with interest – and Neighbourhoodie would love to talk to you if you have further questions on this topic. 

Also, please don’t forget to seek Joan out at the upcoming ApacheCon 2018 on September 27 in Montreal, Canada. She will be renewing her famous “Top 10 Misconceptions about CouchDB” talk with new observations for the 2.x era. Additionally, Joan looks forward to chatting with the community about all things CouchDB!

Thank you for your time. If there’s something you’d like to see covered on the CouchDB blog, we would love to accommodate. Please email us!

For more about CouchDB visit couchdb.org or follow us on Twitter at @couchdb.