Hi
I'm currently evaluating couchdb as a candidate to replace the relational
databases as used in our Telecom Applications.
For most of our data I can see a good fit and we already expose our service
provisioning as json over REST so we're well positioned for a migration.
One area that concerns me though is whether this technology is suitable for our
list data. An example of this is Mobile Number Portability where we have
millions of rows of data representing ported numbers with some atrributes
against each.
We use the standard Relational approach to this and have an entries table that
has a foreign key reference to a parent list.
On our web services we do something like this:
Create a List:
PUT /cie-rest/provision/accounts/netdev/lists/mylist
{ "type": "NP"}
To add a row to a list
PUT /cie-rest/provision/accounts/netdev/lists/mylist/entries/0123456789
{ "status":"portedIn", "operatorId":1234}
If we want to add a lot of rows we just POST a document to the list.
The list data is used when processing calls and it requires a fast lookup on
the entries table which is obviously indexed.
Anyway, I'd be interested in getting some opinions on:
1) Is couchdb the *right* technology for this job? (I know it can do it!)
2) I presume that the relationship I currently have in my relational database
would remain the same for couch i.e. The entry document would ref the list
document but maybe there's a better way to do this?
3) Number portability requires 15 min, 1 hour and daily syncs with a central
number portability database. This can result in bulk updates of thousands of
numbers. I'm concerned with how long it takes to build a couchdb index and to
incrementally update it when the number of changes is large (Adds/removes).
What does this mean to the availability of the number? i.e. Is the entry in the
db but its unavailable to the application as it's entry in the index hasnt been
built yet?
4) Telephone numbers like btrees so the index building should be quite fast and
efficient I would of thought but does someone have anything more concrete in
terms of how long it would take typically? I think that the bottleneck is the
disk i/o and therefore it may be vastly different between my laptop and one of
our beefy production servers but again I'd be interested in other peoples
experience.
Bit of a long one so thanks if you've read it to this point! There's a lot to
like with couchdb (esp the replication for our use case) so I'm hoping that
what i've asked above is feasible!
Thanks
John
