Canonical Drops CouchDB From Ubuntu One 93
rsk writes "Since the Ubuntu One desktop synchronization service was launched by Canonical it has always been powered by CouchDB, a popular document-oriented NoSQL data store with a powerful master-master replication architecture that runs in many different environments (servers, mobile devices, etc.). John Lenton, senior engineering manager at Canonical, announced that Canonical would be moving away from CouchDB due to a few unresolvable issues Canonical ran into in production with CouchDB and the scale/requirements of the Ubuntu One service. Instead, says Lenton, Canonical will be moving to a custom data storage abstraction layer (U1DB) that is platform agnostic as well as datastore agnostic; utilizing the native datastore on the host device (e.g. SQLite, MySQL, API layers, 'everything'). U1DB will be complete at some point after the 12.04 release."
Our sync service is not “powered by CouchDB& (Score:5, Informative)
Our structured data sync service is CouchDB, except for tomboy notes. Syncing files is a completely separate stack.
Re:Specific Issues (Score:5, Informative)
The only "new thing" is a database abstraction layer that they should have already been using to begin with. Who in this day still writes their software heavily coupled to a single database rather than using a thin abstraction layer?
we did, it's desktopcouch. Turned out to be too thin.
Original message from John Lenton (Canonical) (Score:5, Informative)
From the first days of Ubuntu One, before we were even in Ubuntu, we've
had a structured data storage sync service based around CouchDB.
For the last three years we have worked with the company behind CouchDB
to make it scale in the particular ways we need it to scale in our
server environment. Our situation is rather unique, and we were unable
to resolve some of the issues we came across. We were thus unable to
make CouchDB scale up to the millions of users and databases we have in
our datacentres, and furthermore we were unable to make it scale down to
be a reasonable load on small client machines.
Because of this, we are turning off most of our CouchDB-related
efforts. The contacts, notes and playlists databases will continue to
exist on our servers to support the related services, but direct
external access to the underlying databases will be shut off. Any other
databases will be deleted from our servers entirely.
For these same three years we have created and maintained desktopcouch,
which is a desktop service (and related library) to access CouchDB more
conveniently. Because we are no longer going to pursue CouchDB, we will
no longer be developing desktopcouch; in fact, if anybody wants to take
over, we'll be happy to work with you to make that official. For the
upcoming 12.04 the Ubuntu One packages will not depend on desktopcouch
nor couchdb in any way, and we'd recommend the distribution seriously
consider whether they want to continue having the package in main,
especially if no maintainer shows up.
Because we still believe there is a lot of value to our users in the
service we wanted to offer based on CouchDB, we're building something
new, based on what we've learned. It's very small, merely a layer of
abstraction and the definition of an API that will allow us and others
to build what is needed ontop of existing tools. We're calling it U1DB
for now, until it comes of age. If you're interested and techincally
inclined you can follow our progress on lp:u1db; unfortunately our
timing and resources are such that we can only promise the reference
python implementation will be ready in time for 12.04, and thus 12.04
will ship without Ubuntu One having a solid story around synchronizing
arbitrary structured data.
Thank you for reading.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-November/003474.html
Re:Rolling your own (Score:4, Informative)
You did read the same thing I did, right? They *tried* using someone else's solution, and the solution did not fit their needs. If the existing solutions don't fit your needs, what else can you do other than roll your own? I guess you could drop the service/product altogether and just call it a day, but that doesn't sound like a great business model.
Re:I find Mint very mint (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Original message from John Lenton (Canonical) (Score:5, Informative)
Because the next release is an LTS, which will now be supported for 5 years. If couchdb is kept for the next release, it will need to be supported to another 5 years.