MongoDb vs CouchDb ?

Hi Kyle,

About document oriented database, what would you tell about CouchDb, compared to, say (by any chance), MongoDb ?

1) Is this only a performance point of view ?
I found CouchDb much more difficult to interact with, essentially because it does not provided official libraries (official jars for example).

2) What about "Design documents" in CouchDb, is there a need for them in MongoDb ?

Thanks a lot for your un-opinionated answers,

Tom

Hi Thomas,

What I can say is that although both are classified as "document database", they quite different.

There are huge differences in architecture, storage engine, etc. MongoDB has single-master replication with automated failover. CouchDB has multi-master replication, which requires client-side resolution of conflicts. MongoDB scales by partitioning data across shards. CouchDB is purely replication-based, if I recall correctly.

I do know that there have been big changes in the CouchDB project of late (see CouchBase) but don't know much about them. I'm also not familiar with CouchDB design documents. Sorry I can't be more help!

Kyle

Important differences from an architecture point of view, for sure.
Thanks Kyle for your answer.

Kyle Banker wrote:
I'm also not familiar with CouchDB design documents. Sorry I can't be more help!

I'm not familiar with mongodb beyond casually looking at the site this morning (which I liked) but I would guess that there is no equivalent in mongo because mongo does not aspire to provide both front and back end services, which couch does (hence couchapps and all that). There's probably an advantage to that; as someone else here remarked, the mongo interface looks more flexible and friendly (whereas with couch there is a stress on hardcoding views, etc). A potential advantage of the couch model would be that it allows you to encapsulate more behaviour into the server.

Hum, interesting !