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2457

answers:

3

Hello stackoverflow gurus,

Tonight in my daily tech googling I came across couchDB, after seeing tons of presentations about how it perform ten to hundred times better then any RDBM, how it would save us from SQL languages, tables, primary keys and so much more. I decided myself to try it myself.Only problem it seems I am unable to figure out how it works.

Like for a start I would like to code a web contact manager using couchDB. The project would enable user to do basic stuff like

  • Create/Edit/Delete contacts
  • see a list of their contact ordered
  • search them on various criteria

So how do I start ?

Here some of my thoughts

  • create a database per user like July, Ann
  • in those DB, add some document with type contact, the document would look like this at first place see code 1
  • create/edit/delete is straight forward just need to do the PUT,POST,DELETE in the good database
  • searching would be handled by couchdb-lucene like dnolen suggested

now here come the difficult part, I don't really understand the whole map/reduce concept and how I can use that to do the jobs I used to do with SQL. Also with views how do you handle paging, also grouping.

I would like to build a screen with a paging set of links something like this

John, Doe Johny, Hallyday Jon, Skeet A B C D E F **J** etc ....

what view should I create to achieve that, if you can provide samples it would wonderful.

Thanks for your suggestions

Contact document.

{
type: 'contact',
firstname: 'firstname',
lastname: 'lastname',
email: ['home': '[email protected]', 'work': '[email protected]'],
phone: ['home': '+81 00 0000 0000'],
address: []
... some other fields maybe ...
}
+3  A: 

IBM has a great tutorial, making use of curl to read/write via the REST interface.

Brian Agnew
+1  A: 

Your application is quite easy to do with CouchDB. You would have a database per user. Contacts are simply documents in a particular user's database. CRUD is just talking to the database using HTTP. You could create views that emit keys (last name, first name) to allow for sorting.

For powerful search I would recommend couchdb-lucene.

dnolen
+5  A: 

The upcoming book by O'Reilly is free to read online: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/

Just install and play around - you can do straight http requests using curl on the command line, or use the built-in web interface called futon.

Storing and retrieving data is really easy, the hardest part is thinking in terms of map/reduce-views instead of sql queries.

elmarschraml
thanks for the link actually the book is more detailed then the couch DB documentation ....
RageZ
actually the CouchDB API Documentation is better than a lot of projects. It's kept up to date and accurate. But like all API documentation it's not a cookbook it's a reference work.
Jeremy Wall