#couchone

#COUCHONE by Input Selector Prezintă on Mixcloud

timpul trece muzica nu sta. ia un loc aici si asculta! daca facem asta luna de luna avem mari sanse sa aflam cum suna viitorul. #COUCHONE

Looks like Matthew Aslett (the451group) had his own version of the Couchbase genealogy:

Credit Matt Aslett .

Just in case you thought someone made up the whole thing about the status of CouchDB being confusing:

Found in Koji Kawamura‘s Introduction of CouchDB JP slides .

On the other hand I’m still trying to figure out if things in CouchDB land were more confusing than the various Hadoop versions out there. If you compare the two genealogy trees you’ll notice a reversed pattern.

I read that:

Cloudant might have raised $2.1 million (via Mass High Tech)

Cloudant has a new CEO in Derek Schoettle (previously VP Sales at Vertica Systems, Inc.) (via PR announcement)

After Membase and CouchOne merger, I think it was the general expectation that the new formed Couchbase will carry on CouchOne promise of being the commercial supporters and service company for CouchDB. This made sense considering Couchbase has been offering a CouchDB product: Couchbase Single Server.

On the other hand this situation created a lot of confusion in the CouchDB world and Couchbase offering. It was only one week ago that Couchbase finally came out to clear the waters: they are not and won’t be a support company for CouchDB , nor will they continue offering a CouchDB-only product.

So there’s an unfilled spot in the NoSQL world: a go to company when CouchDB services and support are needed. Truth is I don’t have enough data to decide if there’s also a need in the market for it though.

But I’m wondering if Cloudant will pursue this positioning. At least that’s how I read Cloudant ex-CEO Alan Hoffman words. Or will the change of CEO also mark a change of direction?

Late last night I’ve received an email asking if I could jump in a phone call to hear some exciting news. I had to say pass as it was extremely late, but replied back: “Is it a big client acquisition or M&A?”.

Before falling to sleep I was turning this question on all sides trying to figure out what the answer would be:

if a big client acquisition: what would be the name to make this a big announcement? After going through a couple of possibilities, I’ve decided that most probably that’s not it.

if a merger: what would be the other company? I’ve had a few in mind, so I’ve kept this in my list

if an acquisition: what would be the company interested in getting the scalable and persistent memcached solution? For this one the answer was quite clear.

Fast forward a couple of hours and I’m finding in my inbox the reply: Membase and CouchDB have merged giving birth to Couchbase. Wow!

While I haven’t complitely digested it, at first glance, this is merger based on market potential and not really on technology affinity:

Membase is the persistent/scalable memcached solution using the memcached custom protocol. CouchDB is using HTTP/HTTPS

Membase sweetspot is scaling, CouchDB’s disconnected applications

Membase is a key-value store, CouchDB is a document database

Membase is using a classical, master-slave like, replication model, CouchDB is using a P2P approach for replication

In a way, I have found the confirmation in Damien’s post:

What James had is the vision to see the great fit between the two companies. While independently we were both doing very well, we both have a lot of growing to do yet. And amazingly, the direction Membase needed to grow, we were already doing very well. And in the direction we needed to grow, Membase was already doing very well. Not only were the parts of the stack we were focusing on different and complementary; the way we built out our teams was different and complementary, as well. I’m not sure we could have planned it any better, and we didn’t plan it at all!

I wish I could stayed last night to go over this as I have so many questions. But I guess the questionon everyone’s tongue right now is: when will we see the first products? Because what is planned sounds really exciting:

In addition to the unrivaled performance, reliability and breadth of the Couchbase family, Couchbase will offer the most feature-rich NoSQL database available: the only document database with strict ACID transaction guarantees, multi-point triggers, user code execution across database nodes with scatter-gather support, indexing and query support, database views, real time map-reduce support, immediately consistent (CP) semantics within a datacenter or zone, and eventually consistent (AP) semantics between data centers or zones.

Last, but not least: congratulations to both teams! I'm already watching the new website for the first release.

Other resources

James Phillips’ post: Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!

The remarkable fit transcends technology alone. The cultural fit between teams is hand in glove. We are maniacally focused on building amazing technology and products that delight our users. We’re intensely competitive. And we value, more than anything else, the trust we’ve earned from customers who are managing their mission critical data with our systems. The last two months of joint integration planning have made it clear to me that we’ve assembled a rare and very talented group of people.

Damien Katz’ post: CouchOne + Membase = Couchbase

Technologically, we’ll be joining the products together to create a high volume, low latency, elastic clustered Couchbase server system. A Couch that’s Simple, Fast, Elastic with all the reliability and power of CouchDB. We’ll also continue to support the Membase API, for both backwards compatibility and it’s performance advantages over HTTP. We will be the only solution out there that can scale to Zynga sized workloads and down phones and tablets and everything in between, supporting millions of users and keeping everything in sync.

Damien and James together: CouchOne + Membase: The Video

Introducing Couchbase!. Why this merger makes business sense:

The combination of these technologies effectively combines the most advanced caching and clustering technology with the most reliable and full-featured document database technology in the industry.

We Heard You: CouchOne + Membase = Couchbase. Couchbase technology vision:

In addition to the consistent developer API across products, the Couchbase family will feature automatic end-to-end synchronization based on Apache CouchDB’s killer replication technology – we call it CouchSync. Mobile Couchbase will offer developers of mobile applications a quick and easy solution for storing application data, with the ability to automatically synchronize that data back to a Couchbase cluster in the cloud or in your own data center.

Hacker News discussion

Curt Monash’s Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase

PR announcement on TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm

I just interviewed J Chris Anderson, the CFO of CouchOne, for ReadWriteWeb. CouchOne is the corporate sponsor of an open source database and programming language called CouchDB. Anderson recently started hosting a demo/proof of concept app called Twebz - a decentralized Twitter Client - built with CouchDB and node.js. Anderson explains how CouchDB could be used to decentralize not only Twitter, but most other web applications as well. It's pretty geeky but could have big ramifications: This tech could help build a more resilient Internet in the face of disasters, cyberwarfare and censorship.

The aim is to allow you to interact with Twitter when Twitter is up and you are online. But if Twitter is down for maintenance or you are in the middle of nowhere, you can still tweet. And when you can reach Twitter again, it will go through.

If lots of folks are using it, then they can see each other's tweets come in even when Twitter is down.

Mostly the goal was to show the way on how to integrate CouchDB with web services and APIs.

So if you did release this, and people started using it, and then one day Twitter decided "We're done. We're going to go raise pigs in the Ozarks," Twebz would actually still be up and running fine basically forever and everyone could keep reading each other's Tweets.

Yep. And as a side effect you have a complete personal Twitter archive of the folks you follow.

There's even a feature to pull in the complete history of a user, so you can get the back fill of your closest friends if you want. [...]

Could CouchDB and Node be used in conjunction to create some sort of decentralized darknet? Something along the lines of Freenet?

Node is a good fit for CouchDB because Couch encourages asynchronous background processes, but people also use Ruby / Python / Java for the same purposes. But yes, eventually the plan is that CouchDB will make web applications a lot more robust because they will no longer depend on a centralized point of failure. E.g., even if Twitter goes out of business, people can continue to share messages.

The turnover of Web 2.0 startups is so fast that I think users get discouraged from signing up for services. Why bother with a new photo share if there's a chance it won't be around in a year? But when those are CouchApps, users can continue to use them even if no one is maintaining them, which makes it more rational to invest time in using them. Imagine if Pownce or Dodgeball were still being run by fans.

ReadWriteHack: CouchOne's J Chris Anderson On Decentralizing Twitter - And the Rest Of the Web

I asked him about "darknets" but what this really seems useful for is mesh networks.

For another example of how CouchDB is useful in low-connectivity settings, check out this case study on how Better Health Outcomes through Mentoring and Assessments is using CouchDB in rural Zambia.

For another example of a decentralized social network built on CouchDB, check out CouchAppspora, a port of Diaspora to CouchDB.

Update: Trevor reminds me that I should mention FidoNet for some historical context. PODSnet (Pagan Occult Distribution System Network) may be of particular interest to Technoccult readers.

There doesn’t seem to be a PR announcement (yet), but I’m hearing Couchio, the company started by CouchDB creators, is rebranding to CouchOne:

So, CouchDB, CouchApp, and CouchOne.