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Comment by tumult | Hacker News Reader

The more of these "software hipsters" that fail to understand CouchDB and quickly abandon it, the better. Wish I had more to say about this article, but that's about it.

edit: in case it's not clear, I like couchdb a lot and I think it's absurd that people people are backlashing against it because some monkey coder dorks found it highly buzzword compliant and are making it popular, despite not understanding it at all. So you end up with people hating something because it's getting some limelight for whatever reason, and then also many of the people championing it don't know how to use it correctly to build an app or anything. It's like two layers of stupid.

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Software hipsters are the ones using CouchDB. The relational model has been refined over decades to accommodate the requirements of generic information systems and eliminate a lot of the problems that mapreduce-based databases ignore.

CouchDB solves a subset of information problems. The relational model can solve a vastly greater amount of problems.

But both those subsets have very little overlap. CouchDB is great at solving problems that relational databases never can be good at.

As far as I can tell, it's great for solving problems people don't actually have and probably creating problems they didn't imagine.

What? CouchDB gets a lot of hype. Naturally people are curious, and they try to use it to solve their problems. Sometimes these problems aren't the problems CouchDB is good for. You can't fault the "software hipsters"--- the CouchDB documentation does a terrible job of explaining the "Why" of CouchDB.

I don't know, I think it's pretty straightforward. If you're going to use a piece of software that's based around map/reduce, you should understand the how and why of map/reduce first. CouchDB is actually a pretty straightforward piece of software. The documentation is totally fine. If it seems sparse, it's because CouchDB is a pretty sparse piece of software! It actually has very few features compared to most database systems.

It's more a framework for building a database system IMO; you do what you need to do in views.

If you had actually read my criticism you'd see that I do get what it does. I'm not faulting the design, I like it a lot, it's just that the implementation has issues that caused me to favour other schema free backends.

"software hipster" is an inaccurate characterization. Hipsters tend to choose something because it is simple and stylish rather than actually useful. As an example, they like fixed gear bikes.

Unfortunately, simple and stylish doesn't always win. I see lots of people riding fixed gear bikes in Seattle, for example. Actually, I don't see many people riding them, I see them walking them around because they have the wrong gearing for going up and down Seattle's many hills, and they can't actually ride them. In this case, simple and stylish is the wrong tool for the job -- they need a bike that can change gears. That may be inelegant, but it works really well.

CouchDB is the fixed gear bicycle of the database world.

Using a fixed gear bike in Seattle would be asinine, agreed. Within a relatively flat city, they make a lot of sense, however, and they're practically ideal for running short (< 3 mi, say) errands. They're mechanically simple and require practically no maintenance.

To push the analogy further, some of the buzz around couchDB reminds me of people obsessed with scaling (racing) without either any real understanding of algorithms (being in shape) or any chance of actually needing it (actually competing). That starts to sound more like a road cyclist with an expensive garage ornament, though... Fixed gear bikes are perhaps more like SQLite than couchDB, in that sense. They're actually really useful on a smaller scale.

I see where you're coming from on the hipster bit, just nitpicking.

Hills don't stop them in San Francisco, that's for sure.

"software hipster" -- this speaks volumes. nice.

But not about the author of the OODB system, which is who was discussing it.

His point was that for -his- purposes CouchDB is not a convincing option for the backend object store to KiokuDB, with detailed explanations as to why.

I don't really understand why "this tool doesn't work for me and here's why" makes you a bad person - if he was saying why RDBMSes didn't work for his problem space and thus why he was using an OODB at all, I'm sure the comments would be very different.

I'm not sure software hipster equates to "bad person."

dude you totally made my day =D

In fact: http://skitch.com/nothingmuch/bxtct/yuval-kogman-nothingmuch...

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