Harry Fuecks Talks About "CouchDb: document oriented persistence"

In his SitePoint blog, Harry Fuecks talks about a new project called CouchDb. As always, Harry is on the bleeding edge here. CouchDb is, by it’s own admission, Alpha technology. (Harry calls it a “working prototype”) However, if it pans out, this could be something cool.

The gist of CouchDb is that it’s a database for documents. Yes, I know, you can store documents in RDBMS OODBMS and just about any other *DBMS you care to talk about. The difference is that in most databases you have to define the structure and then fit the document into it. CouchDb uses a simple REST API to allow you to store, retrieve and manipulate it’s data. Here’s a quickie quote from the wiki to give you a feature list.

• A stand-alone document store, accessible via XML REST.
• Ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space.
• Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.
• Query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine with a simplified formula query language.

Harry gives a great little demo of how to setup and use CouchDb and points you to the CouchDb wiki for further reading. The wiki gives a lot of details on how to GET/POST/DELETE articles. It also talks about “Fabric” (pushing the analogy a bit here) the query language for CouchDb. What is not clear from either Harry’s blog or the CouchDb wiki s how you query the document store from within PHP. I’m sure that will come though.

Ok, this really isn’t ready for production work yet but nobody is claiming it is. However it is an interesting little piece of technology to play with and as it grows and matures, this could be a serious niche player. I agree with Harry when is states that this is an interesting project to keep an eye on.

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