On Feb 25, 2009, at 8:30 PM, Scott Zhang wrote:
But what a database is for if it is slow?
To store data, of course. And storing it quickly is just one feature. As an example, a tape backup system has terrible access time, but is still valuable for its vast capacity.
CouchDB has other advantages, like flexibility of storage (no schema needed) and its distributed nature. Sure, most DB servers support replication, but that's not the same thing. As an example (of the kind of thing that interests me) CouchDB could be used to implement a database with millions of server nodes all around the world. The nodes don't have to have any central organization, or necessarily even trust each other. (This is somewhat like the organization of P2P distributed hash table systems like Chord, Pastry, etc.) In some ways performance would be terrible — data that isn't cached at a local node might take seconds or minutes to be fetched from another, and it might take minutes or hours for changes made at one node to propagate to all the others — but other benefits would compensate.
—Jens
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