The discussion of permanodes is one with a long history and is one that always seems to come back. With the release of local snapshots it becomes more and more uncertain if your data will stay alive for longer then 30 days in the tangle. However with local snapshots separation of concerns also become possible! And this is really great!

For our project www.mysoundsafe.com, just like many other projects, we want to choose if we keep data available on the tangle or not for application specific purposes. Snapshotting is simply put -a pain in the ass- when it comes to this and with localsnapshotting being activated it makes harder and harder to keep data alive in the tangle. Ideally we want to selectively keep data and prune what we don’t want to store but to do so we first need to be able to store everything and move from there.

So I decided to run a little experiment to implement a persistence provider other then RocksDB and ZeroMQ. One for an external database, couchbase!.

The benefits!

By using an external persistence provider we can keep the running instance of IRI relatively small without sacrificing the storage and data availability capabilities.