Couch DB moves to the Cloud with CouchIO

According to its motto, the underlying premise behind the open source CouchDB NoSQL database is about helping developers “relax” – chiefly by providing them with a simple, powerful database alternative.

To better help achieve that goal, Couchio, a commercial entity led by the founder of the Apache CouchDB project, is now launching a cloud hosting project to make it easier to ramp up CouchDB projects.

The new Couchio hosting service is currently in beta, but it could hold the promise of helping to accelerate usage of CouchDB among developers, supporters said.

“Basically, we’re trying to provide a super-low-friction way to enable people to get started with CouchDB hosting online,” Damien Katz, creator of CouchDB, told InternetNews.com. “We’re not focusing on large customers or high scalability. Primarily we’re focusing on making it dead simple for people to have a CouchDB instance in the cloud.”

Katz noted that with the Couchio hosting service, the plan is to get around some of the barriers that users have had in getting started with CouchDB. Among the issues cited by Katz is problems that developers may encounter when they try and build a CouchDB instance from source files.

Couchio will also be providing some additional components beyond just a core CouchDB instance.

“We’ll be including Apache Lucene full-text indexing,” Katz said. “That’s an add-on for CouchDB that people usually have to download and build themselves.”

Katz added that support will also be included for the GeoCouch geospatial indexer, which enables address information inside of a document to be added and interpreted. As an example of what the feature can do, a query could be written to find all the points within a certain distance, and GeoCouch can return the appropriate information.

From a management perspective, the Couchio hosting platform will leverage the existing Futon interface technology that CouchDB already provides.

For now, Couchio’s CouchDB service is using Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) as its delivery platform, but that’s not likely to remain where the service is based. For one thing, Couchio will be moving off Amazon – at some point in the future – to reduce cost.

Source: www.databasejournal.com (full article)

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