The Philippine Online Chronicles

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I'm pretty excited about this article because I'm a database fanatic / addict. For those who don't know what a database is, simply put, a database is where your data is stored and defined (whether by a schema or by documents). You use databases everyday as long as you use a computer, a cellphone, or even a website. And for the past weeks, we've seen awesome news from the open source database systems community, which means we will have upgrades on how we use our databases. I'll start off with something very new and fresh.

 

CouchDB celebrates v1.0 release

For a database guru, CouchDB might be a hobbyist of a database system. This is because CouchDB is one of the new kids in town, calling themselves NoSQL, boasting speed and ease of development for your company's resident geeks. I was actually in the middle of doing research to revive an application I considered my baby and, this may sound foreign to some people, create a backend system that would help me automate updates and messages across multiple machines. Since I was a one-man development department in that team that time, I asked for a month of research so that I could architect and develop a system that's highly-scalable, meaning that it could host tons of requests, while, at the same time, being super simple. I came across CouchDB and thought maybe this is all I'd need to accomplish the task.

What actually interested me is CouchDB's ability to replicate and store history of data stored inside it, and the bells and whistles that their notifications system could do. The first thing that crossed my mind that I could develop on a technology like this was a communication system that could do online / offline modes and synchronize across different devices... perfect for local disaster management and coordination. Of course, the possibilities are endless with its webby style of making an application - whether web, mobile or desktop – communicate with the database (CouchDB uses JSON and HTTP for this) and its event-driven data replication.

Even though CouchDB has already been used by big companies like the media company BBC, web-based chat client Meebo, scientific research firm Assay Depot, and even POC's parent organization Vibal Foundation, the only thing that bothers users is its lack of a production-level release. Luckily, just yesterday, the CouchDB team release version 1.0, which boasts a 3x performance gain over the previous stable version, 0.11. There is also a simultaneous release for 0.11.1, an update to the latest stable version which includes GZIP encoding for attachments (CouchDB recommends storing files in them which is totally unrecommended in normal SQL servers) and faster buildup of views, which are a means to present data depending on query conditions.

For those who want to learn more about CouchDB, just go to their official website or read their free online book.

 

PosgtreSQL goes Cloud 9

Nope, PostgreSQL isn't turning into a NoSQL cloud solution of some sort. PostgreSQL is aiming for version 9 release this year and promises a ton of improvements which includes: (1) the much-awaited hot-standby feature, which enables an enterprise database system in a machine to speedily switch to read-only mode via another database machine and do maintenance on them without making the database seem offline; (2) and the most-requested streaming replication, for it is rare for SQL database solutions to include with them out-of-the-box streaming data replication across multiple database machines.

PostgreSQL has long been tagged as an open source alternative for Oracle, the world's biggest commercial database system, and a more enterprising alternative to MySQL, the world's most popular relational database system. Previous versions have been tested against these big database systems and found lacking in features (compared to Oracle) and high performance (compared to MySQL), but PostgreSQL's latest stable release has recently caught up with MySQL in terms of RAM usage and CPU utilization.

My first personal database favorite is actually PostgreSQL and I even used it for my senior project, but I also experienced the pains of setting it up and making it work the way MySQL should work. Further development on top of the database system made me aware of database concepts like replication, sharding and text indexing via tools like the now-built-in Slony-I, PGPool, and Tsearch2. It was my teacher since it's like the poor man's Oracle DBMS, but not really that cheap a solution. It has been used by Skype and social networking player Hi5.

SQLite goes heavy on concurrency

On the upcoming SQLite release this July 22, SQLite promised to add in to their list of features the ability to handle concurrent requests (requests at-the-same-time) via their Write-Ahead Logging implementation. SQLite has been the database system for desktop and mobile applications and it has been long used by giants like Apple, Oracle, and even Microsoft. If you own a Mac and a licensed copy of the iLife, most probably you're using SQLite yourself. SQLite is also the core of Firefox's ability to save application data in a more structured and speedy-search way, that's why it has also been used by other browsers for the upcoming HTML5 plus-feature of offline database storage. This means that in HTML5 – which has already been implemented by Opera, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 – you will have the ability to store data to keep your web experience seamless and uninterrupted even if users get disconnected from the internet.

I remember being very active in the SQLite mailing list and I even created my own lightweight wrapper for Objective-C development. In plain English, it means I was developing for the Mac before and the reason I created this “wrapper” is because I personally wanted to have an uber-lightweight set of libraries or tools to be used for coding in the Mac without translating my messages everytime I communicate with SQLite's libraries. SQLite is very powerful, in which you could use the system with your own file format and still search like a pro within that file. Regular file formats like XML or simple text would be very cumbersome to search and if they grow to a few hundred megabytes, the library that utilizes those files will drag the application down, causing major slowdowns in the database. One of the file formats that are optimized for searching is Microsoft Outlook's PST file format. They could grow up to gigabytes and still not drag down your MS Outlook experience, assuming your mail application didn't catch a virus or a malware.

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CouchDB Logo used under fair use.