When and how often are Views in Cloudant updated? How to configure it to update the Views ONLY when queried?

Question

Are the views in Cloudant updated when we query a view or when a database is updated? According to this Cloudant document, the veiws are automatically updated when there is any change in the database. What does automatically mean?

For example, there are around 5000 documents in the database or much more. Now suppose the database is updated every 1 min. If it updates all of the views in all the design documents every time a change occurs in the database, does it mean that all the views and indexes are updated every min? And if the database is updated even more frequently(maybe <30 secs), it means that the views are basically being updated continuously. How is this efficient? This will just slow down the other database queries and requests won't it?

There has to be a time interval in which cloudant checks if there are any changes. If so what is it and where can I configure it to increase the time? If for my use case I do not need Cloudant to keep updating all the views and indexes every few seconds, how do I configure the database to ONLY update the views when queried?

Thanks in advance. Cheers!

Answer 1

When you query a view on Cloudant, the database will index any documents that require indexing to bring the view up-to-date. Indexes are not updated when the data changes (as in a conventional database), instead the changed documents are queued up and are processed either at query time, or when Cloudant has sufficient spare resources to freshen the views as a background task.