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 ...
}
Answer
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.