Comments on: A gentle introduction to CouchDB for relational practitioners

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:03:30 +0000

CouchOne adapted the above post as a white paper and guest-posted it on their own blog.

By: Jumma

Jumma — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:42:15 +0000

This is nice; it has a somewhat familiar feel to it, though, like the beginnings of an open source Lotus Notes database engine: it has a lot of the attractions, but with cleaner interfaces (like HTTP) which weren’t around in Notes’s early days.

Interesting also, however, that it is missing some of the complications that were added in later versions of Notes – e.g. attribute-level updates, record locking etc. – to compromise with real world problems of volume, performance and functionality.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:25:27 +0000

Bjorn: unlike the file system, CrouchDB handles revisions for you really nicely. You never delete, always create a new document. That specific requirement has lead me, in the past, to using BLOBs in a relational db instead of the file system.

REST is a big plus, but there’s another big one: security.

Using the file system, you’re letting the OS manage the rights. Using CouchDb, you’re keeping the rights management within the datastore. Meaning you can easily scale, and easily back stuff up etc.

Note: I’m assuming CouchDB implements some form of rights :)

By: Björn

Björn — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:54:55 +0000

“The inputs are going to be arbitrary documents with different structures, such as census records, birth records, tax records, estate and probate records, marriage records, and so on.”

If the data is not parseable and cannot be stored in a structured way, you might as well store them in files on disk. Or in file cabinets on paper. No-SQL needed :-)

I agree storing documents as BLOBs in a RDBMS is a crap solution, I fail to see why storing it in CouchDB, magically makes it a better solution.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:32:53 +0000

Fixed, thanks!