CouchDB a real world example

Question

Tonight in my daily tech Googling I came across couchDB, after seeing tons of presentations about how it perform ten to hundred times better then any RDBM, how it would save us from SQL languages, tables, primary keys and so much more. I decided myself to try it myself. Only problem it seems I am unable to figure out how it works.

Like for a start I would like to code a web contact manager using couchDB. The project would enable user to do basic stuff like

Create/ Edit / Delete contacts
see a list of their contact ordered
search them on various criteria

So how do I start ?

Here some of my thoughts

create a database per user like July, Ann
in those DB, add some document with type contact, the document would look like this at first place see code 1
create / edit / delete is straight forward just need to do the PUT, POST, DELETE in the good database
searching would be handled by couchdb-lucene like dnolen suggested

now here come the difficult part, I don't really understand the whole map/reduce concept and how I can use that to do the jobs I used to do with SQL. Also with views how do you handle paging, also grouping.

I would like to build a screen with a paging set of links something like this

John, Doe
Johny, Hallyday
Jon, Skeet

A B C D E F **J** etc .... <-- those are link to see persons with that first name

what view should I create to achieve that, if you can provide samples it would wonderful.

Contact document.

{
    type: 'contact',
    firstname: 'firstname',
    lastname: 'lastname',
    email: ['home': '[email protected]', 'work': '[email protected]'],
    phone: ['home': '+81 00 0000 0000'],
    address: []
    ... some other fields maybe ...
}

funny I read just the opposite that CouchDB is really slow. As with all erlang software, it's dead slow with 1-4 cores, but only starts to shine when you scale up to 32+ cores — Toad
For a similar product but based on c++ you could look at: mongodb — Toad
sorry everyone to kind of change my question in the middle but I really want to see implementation in detail, I am planning to talk my manager to use it, so I need to master the subject before doing any moves. — RageZ

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-05T16:04:36

The upcoming book by O'Reilly is free to read online: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/

Just install and play around - you can do straight http requests using curl on the command line, or use the built-in web interface called futon.

Storing and retrieving data is really easy, the hardest part is thinking in terms of map/reduce-views instead of sql queries.

CouchDB a real world example

3 Answers