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It’s an established trend in the modern software world that if you want to get something done, you'll probably need to put together a web service to get do it. People expect data and services to be available everywhere, in a mobile world. With the plethora of frameworks and technologies available to go about implementing a web service, it becomes a chore to try using anything beyond what's already familiar. But every now and then it’s an enjoyable experience to dive into something new and distinctly unfamiliar.

[caption id="attachment_1628" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Weird Al's not the only one who knows how to go large with Jackson"][/caption] A couple of months ago I was asked to build a processor that would take a JSON file; perform a few elementary checks and transformations and upload the resulting records into a Couch DB. I hadn't done any JSON, or Couch and, naturally, the whole thing had to be done yesterday - but at first glance it didn't look like much of a challenge. However, looking a little deeper, my processor was going to be part of a replication process across two databases housed in separate enterprises. The replication was going to be based on a daily snapshot - each JSON file would be a copy of the entire database - and a few back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that the files may become rather large (40+GB) over time.