Thanks again.

Great writeup Harry

Many thanks.

Looks not so useful…

As a prototype, understood. But as a project - where it’s headed strikes me as very useful.

For web developers, being able to replicate databases easily, over HTTP, is a big one. Imagine being able to get yourself 10 cheap hosting accounts from different companies, of the $5/month variety, and running multiple replicating copies of your database in parallel on each, with one more expensive account running a reverse proxy in front of all 10 - assuming the latency between the reverse proxy and the backend servers is not too significant, it’s a cheap to run a fault tolerant site. It’s worth listening to the podcast to hear Damiens thoughts on offline storage.

Also, as the above example with $_POST attempts to point out, being document oriented may simplify development of certain categories of application. Given that the web is primarily resource / document oriented, using a database engine that reflects that means creating / updating might be as simple as passing through a POST. Much of this ORM / ActiveRecord “joy” falls away.

Another potential benefit would be simplifying search - as all documents are effectively a single “unit” of data, they’re easier to index - vs. building a search index out of multiple columns of multiple tables.

To an extent I guess you could say, compared to relational DBs, CouchDb is storing data in a de-normalized form, from which a normalized form can be generated, but the issue of normalization becomes transparent to the code creating / updating the data, hence simplification. That also probably means you can do most writes in a single operation - reduced need for transactions.

enter CouchDb where (if I’ve understood right) you can “compile” tables from the contents of your raw documents using it’s fabric formula language. Assuming the processing done to create the tables is reproducible, replicating databases across systems would then “only” be a matter of copying the raw documents.

Yup, nailed it, that’s pretty much exactly how it meant to work.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to cook up a few more demos to what kinds of applications can be built on this system.