Couchbase Server provides a simple, distributed document store. Written in a combination of Erlang using components of OTP for clustering and supervision alongside some C/C++, Couchbase Server manages the distribution of documents across a cluster of commodity hardware allowing for indexing of these documents and analytics through views. The system is accessible from nearly any programming language or through one of two open protocols: HTTP and memcached protocol.
This session will be a case study in designing and building this distributed, document oriented database. Couchbase ran into challenges with understanding where performance bottlenecks were in the system, for which Couchbase’s Dustin Sallings contributed new DTrace probes to the common Erlang VM. Using these probes, Dustin and the Couchbase team were able to identify and correct bottlenecks in the system. Since then, Dustin and others in the Erlang community have collaborated to enhance Erlang observability. Couchbase also had to overcome some challenges in trying to cluster the system to ever larger groups of computers with Erlang/OTP. The Couchbase team has been able to overcome these challenges with careful separation of cluster management from data management processing and careful attention to how OTP is used in the system.
Video Producer: http://www.erlang-factory.com/