tor-async-couchdb

tor-async-couchdb is an opinionated Tornado async client for CouchDB. tor-async-couchdb is intended to operate as part of a service’s application tier and interact with the service’s data tier implemented using CouchDB.

tor-async-couchdb documentation isn’t as strong as it could be. sample services are best way to gain an understanding of how to use tor-async-couchdb.

tor-async-couchdb was originally created for use with CouchDB. tor-async-couchdb has also been used with Cloudant DBaaS and Cloudant Local.

tor-async-couchdb was created as a way to capture a very opinionated set of best practices and learnings after operating and scaling a number of services that used CouchDB and Tornado. The bullets below summarize the opinions.

• services should embrace eventual consistency

• thoughts on data models:

  • every document should have a versioned type property (ex type=v9.99)

  • documents are chunky aka retrieval of a single document should typically be all that’s necessary to implement a RESTful service’s endpoint ala standard NoSQL data model thinking

  • assume conflicts happen as part of regular operation

  • sensitive data at rest is an information security concern that must be addressed

    • each property should be evaluated against a data and information classification policy

    • this is a good example of data classification policy

    • if a property is deemed sensitive it should ideally be hashed using bcrypt if possible and otherwise SHA3-512

    • if a sensitive proprerty can’t be hashed it should be encrypted using Keyczar

• direct tampering of data in the database is undesirable and therefore tamper resistance is both valued and a necessity

• to prevent unncessary fragmentation, CouchDB, not the service tier, should generate document IDs

• document retrieval should be done through views against document properties not document IDs

• one design document per view

• horizontally scaling CouchDB should be done using infrastructure (CouchDB 2.0 or Cloudant) not application level sharding

Using

Install tor-async-couchdb.

>pip install tor_async_couchdb

Configure tor-async-couchdb in your service’s mainline. Typically the configuration options are expected to come from a configuration file and/or the service’s command line.

from tor_async_couchdb import async_model_actions

async_model_actions.database = "http://127.0.0.1:5984/database"
async_model_actions.tampering_signer = None
async_model_actions.username = None
async_model_actions.password = None
async_model_actions.validate_cert = True