Couchbase Spearheads Performance Enhancements for Apache CouchDB

Couchbase, Inc., the NoSQL database company formed through the recent merger of CouchOne and Membase, announced the completion of a substantial body of work resulting in performance gains for Apache CouchDB, the open source document database.

                  Apache CouchDB

 
Under the leadership of Damien Katz, Couchbase CTO and the creator of CouchDB, the Couchbase team targeted specific areas for improvement – disk write performance, indexing performance, and disk space required for data storage – and conducted a battery of benchmarks to validate performance gains. These enhancements are available in the developer preview of Couchbase Single Server 2.0, the company’s packaged distribution of Apache CouchDB and have been contributed back to the Apache CouchDB project for community review and acceptance.

Couchbase developers have achieved performance gains across a number of specific areas. Quantitative data is derived from benchmarks comparing Couchbase Single Server 1.1.1 to the developer preview of Couchbase Single Server 2.0, the latter of which incorporates the performance work.

Benchmarks are discussed on the Couchbase blog:

• Disk write performance gains: bulk loading of documents is now two to three times (2x-3x) faster;
• Indexing performance gains: view generation now executes three times (3x) faster;
• Disk storage reduction: extensive optimization of the on-disk storage format reduces by half the amount of disk space required for database and index files, further increasing I/O efficiency.

All improvements are available in the Couchbase Single Server 2.0 developer preview, which is available for download.

All performance work has been contributed back to the Apache CouchDB project for review and acceptance by the Apache community.

More information on all Couchbase technologies can be found at the recently unveiled www.couchbase.org website, home of the Couchbase open source community.

Damien Katz, Couchbase CTO and creator of CouchDB, said: "The work we are doing on performance is truly awesome. For the backend storage engine, we’ve tripled write throughput while using significantly less disk space, and are seeing huge gains in view indexing performance. And we aren’t done yet, not even close."

Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO, said: "Couchbase continues to invest heavily in advancing CouchDB technology, and we are excited about the performance gains users will enjoy from the latest contributions from Damien and the team. We eagerly anticipate community review and acceptance, and look forward to continuing our work alongside other contributors to push CouchDB forward as the industry’s leading document database."