How does CouchDB handle data?

How is authentication handled in CouchDB? Say I create Admin users and Readers, and assign them roles. Say also that I ass开发者_JAVA技巧ign them to an individual database. On the file system level, is there a way for someone who is not authenticating, to look at the data that is stored in the database? Is the data stored as plain text in a file? How is this handled in CouchDB?

Through the database interface, roles are just as strong as they are in any other database. As long as they can't get hold of the files, it's absolutely as secure as your permissions and passwords. However, if they do, there's absolutely no compression or encryption built into CouchDB. Encrypt the data in your code (or your abstraction layer if you use one) if file system access control is a concern - of course anyone who gets hold of your DB filesystem could probably find your code's decryption keys, as well.

It's not a plain text file, it's a binary file that combines the data and indices, but you could copy it to a local CouchDB install and view it that way, or just open it in a good text editor. The data chunks are stored in plain text (JSON, actually) and isn't hard to read, though binary attachments remain binary.