Synchronizing Applications

Question

I have a standalone network device. It needs to be reworked to function as part of a geographically distributed group of these devices. Synchronization between devices in the group need not occur frequently, not more than hourly. The application is rails with SQLite.

Mainly, we want to keep certain pieces of information collected on these devices in sync. Because of the deployment, it isn't feasible to add a large database cluster.

I have been considering CouchDB since replication and handling conflicts resulting from replication is a strong suit of its.

What do you think of CouchDB as a mechanism to keep distributed network devices synchronized? Any thoughts or suggestions for an alternative approach?

Answer 1

What is the particular question?

CouchDB implements master-master replication which is exactly what you are asking for.

Or?

Answer 2

CouchDB would be a great fit for this, because as you say, it has master-master replication. Since you're replicating over the WAN, another huge add is that CouchDB was designed to handle going on and off the network gracefully, which will be a nice piece of fault tolerance.

A lot of people have used CouchDB for this type of situation. Take a look at some case studies (http://www.couchbase.com/customers/case-studies) and a recent blog post I wrote about using CouchDB to keep front end servers' session data synchronized (weblog.bocoup.com/storing-php-sessions-in-couchdb).

Also, it would help if you posted more information about your case so that we can help cater our answers.

Cheers.