RVZ

We have been working in a software using CouchDB and now it's time to tell something about it.

The first thing will be an explanation of the problem, and in the next posts we will talk about the solution that we're using y why we choose it.

The problem

The physics deparment of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (from now ULPGC) was making a lot of their calculations using data from other physics departments arround the world.  But there is no place to hold this data, not their own results from their calculations, neither the data from others departments in an standard way.  Futhermore, the calculations made by a department can use previous calculated results,  experimental results or a mix of both.

As well, they told us that physics congress were used,  among other things, to share results from the same calculation and to check that their experimental  or calculated results were correct.

So we have to seek a solution and we propose a system which could have saved all the calculus in a distributed and synchronized way. All the machines that decided to use this net could share their calculations and receive automagically the calculations from others. The system also should have a REST interface to talk with the database. The saved calculations should have differents initials conditions, or  input data, or even differents approximations to a same calculation.

This system should let, save any kind of calculation, not taking care of the calculation itself, the number of conditions or the magnitude that it's using.

With all these preconditions, we realized that we need a quite dinamic system. It could be done with a relational database, but that implies a complex and harder model, and a lot of work to make the synchronization with the other nodes.

So, our solution was CouchDB.

In the next post I will talk about the architecture that we are using by the moment.