[jchrisa]

Our customers tend to be the kind who need extreme performance, so they aren't spanning cluster across WANs. For well-tuned datacenters rack awareness (putting the replicas in sane places), is more useful.

For WAN replication we have a cross-datacenter replication which works on an AP model.

[jedberg]

To be clear, I was in no way making a judgement about CouchDB vs. Cassandra. I've only give Couch a cursory glance so I wouldn't be qualified to make such a judgement.

I was simply trying to point out that while you may have a very good argument as to why Couch is better, the network partition argument is not sound, and you may want to look for a better argument to make.

I'm personally against single masters because they are SPOFs. With a master, at some point there needs to be a single arbiter of truth, and if that is unavailable, then the system is unavailable.

[strmpnk]

A nitpick, but an important one which I wish the Couchbase folks wouldn't let slip as often as they do, CouchDB has very different properties from Couchbase and should be considered entirely different database designs regardless of the availability of a sync gateway for replication with a number of JSON stores.

[jchrisa]

Different database designs, but similar document model. In fact, Couchbase Sync Gateway is capable of syncing between Couchbase Server and Apache CouchDB. Also our iOS, Android, and .NET libraries can sync with CouchDB and PouchDB. Everything open source, of course. More info: http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/

[strmpnk]

It's not that it can sync, nor the data model.

It's that these are fundamentally very different databases with different trade offs. You can't just take one and adjust some API calls and expect things to work in a similar way. It only confuses people when it's quietly ignored and others assume that since it wasn't pointed out to be wrong that it must be the same thing.

I've had far too many conversations with people who use Couchbase that can't tell the difference that I would say that it's just general confusion. It's lax work on Couchbase's part and a thorn in the Apache CouchDB project that there is no effort to help clarify the fact that they are indeed independent and now very different databases.

[jchrisa]

Exactly. Couchbase trades some availability during rebalance for more lightweight client interactions. As Damien argues in his post, this allows it to meet the same SLA with less hardware.

[bbromhead]

Cassandra has rack awareness...