News

Apache CouchDB 3.0 NoSQL Database: A Major Milestone

• By John K. Waters
• February 27, 2020

The long-awaited 3.0 release of the Apache CouchDB open source NoSQL database was announced this week. The CouchDB team made the announcement in a blog post, and described this version in a tweet as "a major milestone in the history of the project."

Where CouchDB 2.0, released in 2016, focused on the community's "original vision" of a replicating, clusterable, highly scalable data store that's easy to use, v3.0 is all about addressing shortcomings reported by the community since that release, with a special emphasis on security, smoother operational behavior and gearing up for CouchDB 4.0.

The list of new features and upgrades in this release includes:

• Default installations are now secure and locked down
• User-defined partitioned databases for faster querying
• Live Shard Splitting for incremental scale-out
• Updated to modern JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey 60
• Official support for ARM and PPC 32bit and 64bit systems
• Many large and small performance improvements
• Automatic view index warmer
• Smarter compaction daemon
• Smarter I/O queue
• Much improved installers for Windows
• macOS binaries are now notarized for full future Catalina support
• Extremely simplified setup of Lucene search

Apache CouchDB is an open source NoSQL document database that collects and stores data in JSON-based document formats. It uses a schema-free data model, which simplifies record management across computing devices, mobile phones and Web browsers.

For replication, it uses the CouchDB Replication Protocol, synchronizing JSON documents between two peers over HTTP/1.1 by using the public CouchDB REST API. "The Couch Replication Protocol lets your data flow seamlessly between server clusters to mobile phones and web browsers, enabling a compelling offline-first user-experience while maintaining high performance and strong reliability," the team explained in the blog post.

CouchDB was first released in 2005 and became an Apache Software Foundation project in 2008. The database is supported by an active community of developers. IBM's Cloudant is based on CouchDB

The CoudDB team is publishing a series of blog posts ("Road to CouchDB 3.0") with lots of details about the specific features of this release. CouchDB 3.0 can be downloaded from the Apache project Web site.