Alex Stetsenko

Recently I’ve decided to work further on my writing skills and volunteered to review Bradley Holt’s new book Scaling CouchDB. Especially since I am working on scaling MySQL and playing with MongoDB, I figured it would be a great opportunity to take a look at CouchDB too.

What’s in the book.

• Good introduction on what scaling is and how it is different from high availability
• Extensive overview of major scaling blocks like replication, load balancing and clustering including load testing guide using Tsung.
• Comprehensive examples which actually could work as a CouchDB reference\cookbook. However if there are no plans for detailed review or trying the code, sometimes one may feel like it is not much to read once examples are skipped.
• Great insight on how CouchDB works internally in certain cases. The book does not say ‘just do this’, it also explains how CouchDB processes certain commands internally.
• Valuable warning and recommendation notes as great addition to examples.

Conclusion.

The book is short and really informative reference on scaling CouchDB. Also it is still a good reading with respect to scaling topic for those who are not working with CouchDB but interested in peeking at NoSQL world.

P.S.: I would like to thank Bradley Holt for letting me review his new book and providing an ebook version before the paper one was even printed.