Neighbourhoodie’s Newsletter June 2023
Welcome to the second edition of Neighbourhoodie’s quarterly Newsletter. Every three months we are happy to send you news and updates on the technologies we work with: Apache CouchDB™, JavaScript, Offline First software development.
Neighbourhoodie and CouchDB
RELEASE: Structured Query Server 🎉
We are proud to announce that from now on you can query CouchDB with SQL with our new Structured Query Server (SQS).
Structured Query Server (SQS) is an SQL query engine for CouchDB, letting you use complex SQL SELECT statements to extract information from a CouchDB database with extreme flexibility.
News from Apache CouchDB™
Releases
We are participating in the Open Source project and helping to get new releases ready to download. Please find information on the latest releases here.
Current version of Apache CouchDB is 3.3.2, which includes a security update.
Among a few other fixes & improvements, CouchDB 3.3.2 (and 3.2.3) has shipped a greatly improved OS Process manager, which makes building many JavaScript views more efficient. It also closes a security hole that is relevant if you let your users or customers create their own design documents. \See our CVE Guidance Special Edition of this newsletter to see what you need to do to stay safe. **And make sure to stay subscribed to receive these in the future.
If you want to download the latest version of CouchDB for Windows or Mac, please visit our website.
Development — What comes next
If you would like to have an update on the CouchDB project, you can listen to Jan Lehnardt’s talk in our CouchDB Meetup in November 2022. You can find the recording here.
Since then, the CouchDB main branch has landed a number of very interesting PRs, or is about to. We want to highlight two of these today:
- Nouveau: Robert Newson of couchdb-lucene fame has done it again: Nouveau is the third iteration of a Lucene indexing solution for CouchDB. couchdb-lucene was geared towards CouchDB 1.x; the current CouchDB Search Plugin supports 2.x and 3.x (especially clustering), but unfortunately, technology choices at the time were not geared towards ease of contribution and ease of maintenance. As a result, while fully functional, the codebase is aging rapidly. Now Nouveau, which currently is slated to be released as experimental in the next CouchDB feature release, brings modern Java development practices and dependencies to the world of modern Lucene bindings to CouchDB. We can not wait!
- QuickJS: Nick Vatamaniuc has done the lion’s share of building a version of couchjs that uses Fabrice Bellard’s QuickJS JavaScript engine as opposed to the current SpiderMonkey. Aside from significantly reducing the maintenance burden for the CouchDB development team, it comes with its own set of very nice performance improvements, quoting from the PR: “3x faster than SM 1.8.5, 4x faster than SM 91, 6x reduced memory usage per couchjs process (5MB vs 30MB)”. The team is currently sorting out some Windows build issues and preparing for a safe migration plan before this can land in a future CouchDB release.
Neighbourhoodie’s Work
Interesting Case Studies
During the last year we have worked with interesting customers. It was not only a pleasure to work with the people involved, but also to help develop the project. We have written down the specifications of three of our projects in our case studies.
Event Announcements
Neighbourhoodie Events
There is no meetup scheduled yet, but we are planning a new meetup format which includes small CouchDB training units. The new meetup series starts late summer 2023. We will send more information via this newsletter list as soon as possible.