Blog Posts

• Merging rcouch

Weekly CouchDB meeting – summary

• Bigcouch Merge: work on branches has started again and will make good progress
• rcouch Merge: code reviews have been restarted; more help with testing is needed; discussion around Windows support, will be continued on Dev-Mailing list
• Advocate Hub: onboarding at the moment, next steps will be sent to marketing mailing list soon
• 1.6.0 release: release candidate 3 (rc3) is being prepared now
• COUCHDB-1986: the issue is being investigated, will be updated soon if its status changes

Major Discussions

1.6.0 changelog review (see thread)

A discussion around what exactly should be included in 1.6.0 (see changelog and documentation for details).

Handling the Welcome Request (see thread)

How to handle the welcome message that appears from a root request and direct the “/” request to another URL (setup: version 1.5 on a Windows machine).

authentication_redirect is not working (see thread)

How to handle the redirection of users after login to other databases that service page requests (and avoid errors; setup: public application with CouchDB-based authentication).

Vote: Release Apache CouchDB 1.6.0 rc2 (see thread)

The vote was aborted because of an issue brought up by the test suite.

Modeling Relationships and providing Transactional Integrity (see thread; ongoing discussion)

… and the question if _bulk_docs is transactional (hint: it’s not)

Releases in the CouchDB Universe

• openSUSE has issued a security update for CouchDB which fixes a vulnerability that can be exploited to cause a DoS
• couchbeam 1.0.3, that helps you access and manage multiple CouchDB Nodes
• MyCouch 1.0.0, a simple asynchronous CouchDB and Cloudant client for .Net
• follow 0.11.0, a robust, fault-tolerant CouchDB changes follower
• docuri 1.0.1 – rich document IDs for CouchDB
• Proxee, an API proxy that stores data in CouchDB

Opinions

• CouchDB – short review
• Unit testing CouchDb design documents
• “We Don’t Have MongoDB – is CouchDB OK?”
• CouchDB security and PouchDB authentication
• Pagination Strategies with PouchDB
• Help open-source maintainers stay sane (ongoing discussion thread)

Use Cases, Questions and Answers

• StackOverflow: HTTP PUT request to save data to CouchDB Server – Java Android?
• StackOverflow: CouchDB delay building index (CouchDB 1.5.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2)
• StackOverflow: Couchdb key-pair structure
• StackOverflow: CouchDB Erlang View
• StackOverflow: CouchDB install error: You must `brew link nspr spidermonkey unixodbc wxmac’
• StackOverflow: Couchdb socket hang up in view
• StackOverflow: ElasticSearch river cannot access CouchDB over HTTP
• StackOverflow: CouchDB Document Map Modification

Get involved!

If you want to get into working on CouchDB:

• rcouch Merge: Erlang hackers and CouchDB users, we need your help with testing and review of the rcouch merge. It’s easy! Find the how-to in this post.
• Here’s a list of beginner tickets around our currently ongoing Fauxton-implementation. If you have any questions or need help, don’t hesitate to contact us in the couchdb-dev IRC room (#couchdb-dev) – Garren (garren) and Sue (deathbear) are happy to help.
• You want join us for the updates of CouchDB-Python for Python 3? Take a look at issue 231.

We’d be happy to have you!

Events

• April 29 – 30, Cologne, Germany: NoSQL matters conference
• September 1 – 5, Munich, Germany: International Workshop on NoSQL Databases and Linked Data Applications – the Call for Papers is now open
• November 17 – 21, Budapest, Hungary: ApacheCon Europe 2014 (the Call for Papers is now open, too!)

Job opportunities for people with CouchDB skills

• Software Developer Engineer, Paris, France
• Senior Software Engineer, South San Francisco, CA

… and also in the news

• Founder School Session: The Future Doesn’t Have to Be Incremental
• Six Lessons Learned the Hard Way About Scaling a Million User System
• Passwords are Obsolete
• How ‘DevOps’ is Killing the Developer

Posted on behalf of Lena Reinhard.

rcouch is a variant of CouchDB that is derived from the main Apache CouchDB code base. One way to look at it is as a “future port” of CouchDB, that is for two reasons:

1. The internals are greatly improved. In simple terms, if CouchDB would be started to day, it would look a lot like rcouch.
2. It comes with a number of nice new features.

So whether you are a CouchDB user or a CouchDB Erlang developer, rcouch is good news for you!

Since CouchDB has been around for a while, the internal codebase is a little crufty. We are constantly working on improving that, but one of the larger efforts have been done within the rcouch project by Apache CouchDB committer Benoit Chesneau.

At the same time, Benoit added a number of nice little features that benefit CouchDB users, just to name a few:

• _changes for views.
• Replication from views.
• Write-only “Drop-Box” databases.
• Request validation on-read.
• _db_changes (actually, we nicked that one for Apache CouchDB 1.4 already :).

For more information, see the rcouch website.

Benoit has generously donated the rcouch project back to Apache CouchDB and has worked on merging the rcouch and the CouchDB codebases. Now it is time to review the merged code and get it into Apache CouchDB proper and put it into a new release.

With that, we need your help.

How you can help, you ask? Easy!

If you are a CouchDB user, and are not afraid to build CouchDB yourself, give the rcouch merge branch a spin:

git clone https://github.com/apache/couchdb.git
cd couchdb
git checkout -b 1994-merge-rcouch origin/1994-merge-rcouch

# Read the DEVELOPERS file to install all dependencies

# test regular build:
make

# test build with static icu library
make icu=static

# test build with shared libraries
make libs=shared

# run test suite
make check

# make a release
make rel

# run:
./rel/apache-couchdb/bin/couchdb start

# now CouchDB is running at http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/, as usual, you just won’t see any output.

If you are an Erlang developer, we could use your help with code reviews. Any small chunks will help!

Please see the associated JIRA ticket for more information.

Thanks so much!

FaQ: how does this relate to BigCouch?

It doesn’t really, the BigCouch merge is ongoing and we will announce updates and requests for review when the time is right. Well, actually, if we can convince you to help with the review of the rcouch merge, we can put even more resources on the BigCouch merge 🙂