This is NOT second system syndrome. This is business, pure and simple. I had a long, LONG series of emails and calls with CouchBase about commercial support for Couch. We have some big production apps on it.
When it got down to time to pay for support, they told me (this is 2 months ago) in a rare and unusual bit of candor, that they were going to drop Couch in less than six months, so did I want to buy commercial support for just six months?
I told them not only do I not want commercial support, but I just got so freaked out I would not recommend couch for future projects to clients, because it was obvious that internally the team had moved on.
They asked me not to tell anyone so I didn't, but now that this is out there I can say what I deducted from our discussions: Couch doesn't make any money; MemBase does. Period.
Kevin Smith at Opscode said they're moving away from Couch (and to MySQL) as Couch just doesn't scale. No finely grained reader/writer locks, one reader/writer thread/db, huge and random delays due to checkpointing that can make the server inoperable, difficulty ever finishing a view checkpoint under load, etc. I think he's right - it's been abandoned as a platform.
It's absolutely their prerogative to move on and it seems like the right decision, but it's not a technical decision. The reality is that CouchDB is largely a product running small, toy apps, written by people who won't PAY anything for support. MemBase is being used by big companies with a lot of money to spend on commercial support and enterprise features.
Actually there is still one case where I recommend Couch and it's when you need the mobile sync features. I doubt that they'll make those a priority anytime soon on the MemBase product (at least I haven't seen or heard anything).
This is not news, and should not reflect poorly on Apache CouchDB. AFAICT, Damien's last commit on the project was 18 months ago, and he is by no means the most active commiter, even on a historical basis.[1]
Apache CouchDB's data model is sublime for the domain I often work in, and I think the same goes for a lot of people. It's not just mobile; personally, I don't do anything mobile- or sync-related.
I have no plans on moving on.[2] Apache CouchDB is as active and healthy a project as ever AFAICT, and having hosting providers like Cloudant makes the entire model all that more attractive.
If it's all about business, then slagging on the project that gave your company its name is perhaps not the greatest approach. Moving on is fine, a fact of life. Making things more difficult for those you leave behind isn't cool, especially when your moving on happened a long time ago.
Interesting. I agree with you when you say what makes Couch interesting is its sync (mobile or not) features. There are lots of DBs out there that focus on scale and not enough on sync.
If they want to win the mobile market though, they will have to re-implement the DB in C. Erlang was a good choice on the server but in the current mobile ecosystem it's clearly a drawback.
So, JChris is at Couchbase and developing on a mobile project that synchs with CouchDB. Yet the flagship product at Couchbase cannot do so. I wonder whether Couchbase is planned to synch with CouchDB in subsequent versions?
re: "...Couch just doesn't scale...": I am curious, did you try using the BigCouch project, open source released from Cloudant? I have never used BigCouch on a customer project, but have experimented with it and it is easy to setup and is the scaling architecture that Cloudant uses for their data store as a service business.
Not yet... really, it scales enough for us now. but i've noticed people pick Couch because they think it scales better than, say, MySQL out of the box but the reality is the opposite - you have to pull out the book of scale tricks much earlier w/Couch than w/MySQL.
Also, i really like Couch... so don't take what I am saying here or above as an attack.
When it got down to time to pay for support, they told me (this is 2 months ago) in a rare and unusual bit of candor, that they were going to drop Couch in less than six months, so did I want to buy commercial support for just six months?
I told them not only do I not want commercial support, but I just got so freaked out I would not recommend couch for future projects to clients, because it was obvious that internally the team had moved on.
They asked me not to tell anyone so I didn't, but now that this is out there I can say what I deducted from our discussions: Couch doesn't make any money; MemBase does. Period.
Kevin Smith at Opscode said they're moving away from Couch (and to MySQL) as Couch just doesn't scale. No finely grained reader/writer locks, one reader/writer thread/db, huge and random delays due to checkpointing that can make the server inoperable, difficulty ever finishing a view checkpoint under load, etc. I think he's right - it's been abandoned as a platform.
It's absolutely their prerogative to move on and it seems like the right decision, but it's not a technical decision. The reality is that CouchDB is largely a product running small, toy apps, written by people who won't PAY anything for support. MemBase is being used by big companies with a lot of money to spend on commercial support and enterprise features.
Actually there is still one case where I recommend Couch and it's when you need the mobile sync features. I doubt that they'll make those a priority anytime soon on the MemBase product (at least I haven't seen or heard anything).