Reasons Why CouchDB Is Exciting

I've been playing with CouchDB lately, and having a good time getting out of the relational database mindset. I'm not against relational databases, but I do think the time has come to stop thinking they are the only way to store and process data.

There are a few reasons why I think CouchDB is exciting.

  1. Arbitrary JSON document storage. I like this feature not so much because I'm not required to design a rigid schema, but because it implies that I can store arbitrarily complex and deeply nested data structures. This clears the way for easily storing an object graph without the pains of going through the pains of decomposing into a relational schema.
  2. Incremental view rebuilds. This is a killer feature for me, because it implies that a small change in the data does not invalidate the entire view.
  3. Keys can be complex objects. In other words, you can now use an array or hash as a key in a view. For example, a key can be [2008, 01, 12] which represents a date. Not only is this more flexible, but it lends itself to some very useful query methods. For example, you can query for a range of keys just on the first part of the array.

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