Jan Lehnardt wrote:
I'd be interested to hear what other measures you think Couchbase could
take? Feel free to take this to [email protected] to discuss
with the PMC as well.
One that that might help a lot is a really serious definition of what
Couchbase is - particularly in visible locations like the front page of
couchbase.com. While the name implies a close relationship to CouchDB,
I really can't, for the life of me, find a clear description of what it
does.
I mean, CouchDB is very clearly:
- "a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed using
JavaScript in a MapReduce fashion"
- "A document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API."
with http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/intro.html and
http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/overview.html elaborating quite nicely.
(Less visible is that CouchDB is a great application development
platform. I refer to couchapps, of course).
On the other hand, all I can figure out from couchbase.com is:
- "Couchbase is open source NoSQL for mission-critical systems." and
that one can
- "spread your data across a cluster of machines and randomly access it
with sub-millisecond latency"
- and it's pretty quickly obvious that the most salient features of
CouchDB (RESTful interface, application platform) are missing from
Couchbase
- by and large, it's completely useless for the kinds of things I'm
working on (except maybe as a backend to add some scalability down the line)
What CouchDB is, and why one might use it is very clearly defined.
On the other hand, Couchbase materials (website, white paper, ...) make
a generic case for NoSQL databases - but one that could equally apply to
Hadoop, Riak, graph databases, and the whole range of NoSQL technologies
and products.
Seems to me that not only would a very clear use case and functional
description for Couchbase help distinguish the two, but would also help
Couchbase position itself in the space of available technologies and in
the marketplace. If anything, the "Couch" in Couchbase implies that
it's something like CouchDB - which it really isn't. At best, it's not
very helpful, at worst it's rather misleading.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
