It is a big day here at Cloudant HQ; we are announcing the release of BigCouch 0.4! This release, which brings BigCouch into API equivalence with Apache CouchDB 1.1.1, has been baking for a while, and we are excited that it is now ready for public consumption. Instructions for installing and using BigCouch 0.4 can be found on the BigCouch page. Users running Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu (LTS or newer) or RedHat / CentOS / Amazon Linux are welcome and encouraged to use our prebuilt distributions based on Erlang/OTP R14B01 and SpiderMonkey 1.8.5.

There are a whole slew of new features and performance improvements in this release. You can read the entire list here, but I wanted to highlight a few of our favorite features. These should convince you to upgrade if you haven’t already.

For my money, the killer addition to BigCouch 0.4 is support for ‘zones,’ which allows you control over where you place the individual copies of your data. Cloudant’s hosted service makes extensive use of this feature to protect against isolated failures in individual data centers. As an example, our west coast cluster “Meritage” is actually spread over two different data centers in two distinct geographic regions. We use zone-support to ensure that at least one copy of all of our customers’ data exists in both locations. That way, if one location falls into the ocean or is subject to nuclear attack, our customers’ data is still safe and available. With this feature now in BigCouch, you can extend clusters across multiple locations.

Another important improvement we added, taken from Apache CouchDB 1.1, is support for the replicator DB to help manage multiple replications. The BigCouch replicator DB works the same as the Apache CouchDB version. A nice writeup of usage can be found here.

We’d like to thank everyone in the CouchDB community that has contributed bug reports, patches, feature requests, etc. for BigCouch and to all the brave souls willing to try out the bleeding-edge releases. This release would not be nearly the upgrade it is without all of you. Special shout out goes to Benoit for his help with FreeBSD and native SSL support.

Finally, for those following along with recent events in the land of CouchDB, we’re dedicated to donating and integrating BigCouch to Apache CouchDB. This sort of integration won’t happen overnight, so we are still planning on making releases to BigCouch while we iron out the divergences in the two projects. We very much appreciate the support and enthusiasm we have recieved from the CouchDB community to date, and we look forward to working with that community to strengthen Apache CouchDB.