Barrel : Taking CouchDB to the next level

Relax! Check Barrel out.

Two kinds of people usually use technologies like CouchDB.

• Technology enthusiasts, exploring new stuff and just happened to glance through it
• Developers who were in dire problems and only a solution that was a document-oriented NoSQL database implemented in the concurrency-oriented language Erlang, using JSON to store data could suffice.

I am not going to talk much about why CouchDB is the right fit, bla bla bla, but about a novel new platform that enhances the capabilities of CouchDb by leaps and bounds. The creator of the project is Benoitc, also the creator of super widely used libraries like Hackney and gunicorn, so we know the project is in great hands.

Barrel is a modern document-oriented database in Erlang focusing on data locality and P2P. Barrel also provides Hooks to allow a developer to extend and customize Barrel to suit his/her needs.

Just improving on CouchDB a bit might seem like a lot, but Barrel has a few project goals, that is already making it a top choice amongst databases. Right now Barrel allows for queries in Erlang and Javascript. And Barrel can be extended using Erlang.

Enter Elixir, an amazing new language built on the robust, reliable and proven BEAM VM. Barrel has been selected for the GSOC and one of the prime ideas for implementation over the next couple of months is adding Elixir support to Barrel. It will not only add an entire community of developers and libraries that can extend Barrel, but also open Barrel to relatively new BEAM community members.

I look forward to actively contribute to Barrel and hope you guys also help us out by using Barrel and giving us feedback.