CouchDB was always a curious product that asked the question, "what would happen if your database and your application server were the same product?"
Unfortunately I think the answer was nobody would use it.
Unfortunately I think the answer was nobody would use it.
CouchDB is a document database that can be essentially indefinitely clustered to grow and shrink with your application / traffic demands.
It also comes with a unique replication protocol that allows you to synchronise casually connected instances (say offices around the world, or mobile devices and a cloud) much more like git uses push & pull. No other database really puts that into an open source / open government project.
There’s tons more cool stuff that CouchDB does and its being used in mission critical infrastructure that you’re relying on every day :)
If you could share a bit on those I think the community would be extremely interested. There was that CERN thing a decade ago, if it's still true or there are other actors with similar amounts of data, there would be fewer comments about not finding CouchDB useful
That single featurte right there was why i first had started playing with couchDB several years ago. It really had been quite awesome! I think other features that help it really help with offline-first approaches also are really cool! But, ultimately, after playing with it (and really liking it), i just didn't have a need for too many personal use-cases....since sqlite was "good enough". I thought - and still believe - that for wider (maybe corporate/enterprise?) uses, it can still fit the need....but i don;t hear much buzzz about it in general...so in my case, i stopped using it, and forgot about it. Apologies to any devs behind it, no offnese meant...i just got my personal use-cases covered by sqlite...and on enterprise side, too many internal politics to convince stakeholders that couchdb would be better than other solutions in some use cases.
Also, the documentation back in the day to get started was ok-ish, but there didn't seem to be much around....i guess it could be one of those things where it is/was a great thing...but if not enough attention and use exists, then it won;t trigger a wider audience of devs who will also document more stuff and further triugger a virtuous cycle?
Anyway, good to see the devs are still at it! :-)
The real shame is that Map/Reduce is simply a toy, easy-to-add bonus when looking at the data structure, but that's not what CouchDB is or ever was about. The one reason it was created is replication and simplistic conflict handling, and it does it perfectly.
The reason CouchDB never took off is that it targets offline-first, something you'll see associated with peer-to-peer systems, but does that only for servers: you're supposed to install that thing through packages, configure a text file, run it with your preferred daemon manager, ... If CouchDB had a simple desktop version you could start in one click and forget about, it would have been way more interesting. Alas.