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Comment by coconutrandom | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm, if only there was a database-as-a-service provider for CouchDB. I, for one, would subscribe to our distributed, document based overlords.

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What would you use it for? Also, how would one go about implementing something like this in practice?

CouchDB isn't truly distributed, so one would need to run multiple isolated instances which would in turn impose restrictions on the size of a single database as well as the number of concurrent writes.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a CouchDB interface on top of HBase (or possibly some other column oriented DBMS) to overcome these issues and am wondering if anyone else has considered doing the same thing.

What ~couldn't~ you use it for?

I'm not so sure about the isolated part. If I recall correctly, all instances should have the same data. Hence the size of a given database should match on all instances.

And why restrict the size? ...just charge per mb and put the onus on the user.

I thought you could write a javascript function to filter out datasets for each server, the client then queries multiple servers looking for what it wants?

So you're thinking of a database-in-the-cloud concept?

Specifically CouchDB. Not SimpleDB or Google's Big Table. I've played with CouchDB and Python and I like it but it's overkill for my tiny just for fun projects, but if it turned out more cost effective to host in-house in the future, not having the lock-in is super attractive.

If CouchDB is overkill, how simple are your projects? I thought CouchDB is supposed to be as simple as it gets?

to clarify: too simple to justify upgrading my host and installing when mysql is a button push away.

I like the concept. There could be an interesting business idea here. One of the problems that concerns me is speed of data access. If I'm running the service on AWS, your app will need fast access to your data. If you are hosting your app on AWS, why not run couchDB yourself? You will get much better speeds utilizing the cloud service's internal infrastructure rather than accessing your data via the internet. If you are hosting your web service somewhere else, then why not use the database solutions provided there? I'm just trying to understand the need for this kind of service.

You could run standalone apps made up of static JavaScript, HTML and CSS where the browser clients talk directly to CouchDB. Check this out: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/hosted-applications

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