Using CouchDB to improve healthcare in Africa

couchone.com

39 points·srsaul04··10 comments

Good for them. The asynchronous master-master replication dynamic of couchdb is exactly the right solution for a barely connected federation of clinics. That said, the last paragraphs talk of "instant" as pointed out by Maro is a touch disingenuous.

It's nice to see what "scalability" might mean when few of the technological affordances we often take for granted are available.

This is good stuff :-) but .. s/Africa/rural Zambia/

I am from Somalia, and we're strictly a Redis country.

CouchDB removed my appendix. I didn't even have appendicitis though.

MySQL has been saving tiny little kittens for years.

The last paragraph is so idiotic I almost fell off my chair laughing.

They can now find problems instantly, where before it could have taken months for someone to visit the clinic and see what was going wrong.

By the sound of it, it's not CouchDB that's helping them, it's using a computer and the Internet?

That's basically the point, without CouchDB, they don't have internet, because the connection is spotty, power goes out, and latency makes it unusable when it does work. CouchDB fixes all that.

TCP/IP fixes all that.

Your software will time out long before a packet arrives. You could make your (custom) software never timeout, but your software is likely to become unusable due to pauses whose durations are unknown - what if it takes 5 minutes for a small operation to complete?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/in-south-africa-carrier-pigeon...

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