CouchFS: A High-Performance File System for Large Data Sets

Numerous file systems have been implemented to meet the needs in today´s big data era, however many of them require specific configurations or frameworks for data processing. This paper presents CouchFS, a POSIX-compliant distributed file system for large data sets. We build CouchFS on top of CouchDB, which grants us flexibility to handle semistructured data. Since a database has similar behaviors as a file system, and CouchDB provides a high customizable MapReduce view for indexing, CouchFS is able to achieve high-performance searching for both text and supported binary objects. This work compares search of Wikipedia data using CouchDB, PostgreSQL and Spotlight on HFS+ file system. We show our design of CouchFS and discuss future approaches to improve this file system.