Hacker News Reader

Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

Can someone give me a quick synopsis of what I would use this for?

Is this only for Facebook size scaling or is it of use for those of us just starting out?

I'm not a CouchDB pro by any means but I've been following it from a distance for some time.

The main feature of CouchDB is that it's a fast, scalable database that also allows you to host your apps inside of it, with each "view" being stored in the database itself.

I believe some people use it for large installations but as far as I know that is not the primary focus.

It's a "fast, scalable database" that isn't focused on large installations? What?

While I haven't used couchdb much personally, its most significant characteristics seem to be that it's a document-oriented database (each record can have its own structure) and that it inherits all of Erlang's infrastructure for fault-tolerance.

The offline replication is the one thing no other database touches. (Maybe Lotus Notes but that thing is long in the tooth.)

Well, that's taken long enough. Lotus Notes has everything to do with CouchDB. Damien was a product developer at Iris/Lotus, and in a lot of ways CouchDB is a modern rethink of the best of what Notes/Domino is. When you take away the client and the need to be backwards-compatible to the late Bronze Age (Notes V2 applications from '93 can run unmodified in the current version 8.5 client), you're free to make a lot of improvements, but you also get to keep the good stuff.

We've been using CouchDB in production for at least six months with our web-based content management system and our mobile advertising platform. We also use it to store scores for a couple of mobile games, and to store posts for PicBored, an anonymous image-based forum for Android. I am a bit worried about how well the replication will work with dozens or hundreds of servers, but it's working great with only a handful.

I would use this to replace MySQL or PostgreSQL and I would use it over MongoDB or Cassandra because it is high-quality software, built on top of Erlang (highly concurrent and fault tolerant language, great foundation to start with), and implements really great features.

I personally use MongoDB for small, one-off projects. The good thing about schemaless databases is that you can just start shoving data into them without caring about its structure.

That said, document-based databases suck at complex queries and reporting tasks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com