CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

by J. Chris Anderson, Noah Slater, Jan Lehnardt

Three of CouchDB's creators show you how to use this document-oriented database as a standalone application framework or with high-volume, distributed applications. With its simple model for storing, processing, and accessing data, CouchDB is ideal for web applications that handle huge amounts of loosely structured data. That alone would stretch the limits of a relational database, yet CouchDB offers an open source solution that's reliable, scales easily, and responds quickly. CouchDB works with self-contained data that has loose or ad-hoc connections. It's a model that fits many real-world items, such as contacts, invoices, and receipts, but you'll discover that this database can easily handle data of any kind. With this book, you'll learn how to work with CouchDB through its RESTful web interface, and become familiar with key features such as simple document CRUD (create, read, update, delete), advanced MapReduce, deployment tuning, and more.

Genres: Nonfiction, Programming, Computers, Technology

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Martin]

CouchDB is a fascinating database platform which made tradeoffs on operations and engineers using the end product to optimize for building an elegant (but lacking for most use cases) solution.

I picked up this book to understand how MapReduce could be used in an OLTP workload. I've been toying around with this blockchain indexer which makes building dApps really simple without trading off too much customizability. I wanted to see whether some of the ideas could be incorporated into my indexer to make a simpler abstraction.

I got the information I was looking for, but I have to say this book is poorly written. Lots of duplicate information. Related topics very far apart from each other. Ideas presented before ideas they depend upon. It seems like this is a draft.

As for CouchDB, the platform is interesting but I believe the reason this platform never gained significant adoption was because it was complex in a way which only provided marginal utility for the consumer of the platform. The platform does too much. Jamming display and application functions into the datastore sounds like it would make it very hard to version and operationalize. The MapReduce functions have a massive performance overhead (many copies to get data into and out of SpiderMonkey) and seem impossible to debug. The multi-master replication is cool but conflict resolution should be a user defined function rather than something in the read path. Multi-user workloads seems to be completely unaddressed here (ACLs don't seem to really exist).

Today, 13 years after the books initial publishing, building a datastore with all this functionality is achievable for the average engineer. Modular libraries can be easily composed together to build a tool custom tailored to your workload. LevelDB, RocksDB and LMDB are all battle tested storage engines which did not exist previously. Vector clocks are well understood and widely implemented. WebAssembly allows for the ultimate User Defined Functions (without much overhead if you use with something like Zero-Copy Rust).

[Charlie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Attempts to provide a basic introduction to CouchDB, but it seems to have been written by programmers with very little attention to readability. Various important concepts are glossed over or poorly explained, and various content is duplicated (each section seems to have been written by a different author). Not very good at all.

[Alex Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise, but very good introduction into CouchDB. The book provides all necessary information to start working with database, how to create applications using CouchDB, and how to perform administrative tasks, including replication, scaling, etc.

[Andrew Theken · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good intro to CouchDB. More advanced topics are not covered with much detail, and a large amount of the content is available online, for free. Still, as a general overview of CouchDB, I would recommend this title.

[Joey]

(Read draft copy on website)

[Topilno]

Creating Web Pages for Dummies

[Miguel Coquet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reaaaaaaally liked it , but felt it was at times overly detailed. I was not a fan of the couchapp parts, but in general I felt the book really armed me to start working with Couchdb more seriously.

[Angela Randall]

Can read this for free online here.

[Hristo Deshev · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read. Really informative and contains almost everything you need to ship a CouchDB-based project.

[Jami]

http://guide.couchdb.org/editions/1/e...