Apache CouchDB is a JSON document store with a native HTTP API, server-side JavaScript indexing, and active/active data replication across flexible configurations of server instances that are free to come and go as they please. Under the hood the DBMS is implemented largely in Erlang and features copy-on-write B-trees, hash histories for automatic revision tracking of individual records, and a purely asynchronous index maintenance system. This novel combination of capabilities has been powering web and mobile applications of all shapes and sizes for the past decade.

In this talk we’ll work from the internals out, and show how the underlying design decisions provide CouchDB users with durable, flexible, scalable data management. We’ll discuss the clustering architecture for horizontal scalability introduced in the 2.0 release, and the challenges that eventually-consistent replica management imposes on application developers. We’ll close with a preview of the work in the upcoming 4.0 release to rebase CouchDB as a stateless layer over top of FoundationDB.

This talk is part of the Vaccination Database Tech Talk Seminar Series.

Bio:
Adam is an IBM Fellow working on IBM Cloud’s portfolio of Data Services. He joined IBM in 2014 via the acquisition of Cloudant, a DBaaS based on Apache CouchDB. Adam received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT where he studied the gluon’s contribution to the spin structure of the proton. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and three daughters.

More Info: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2021/#db6