Tuesday, September 04, 2007

CouchDB

I can't remember who's blog pointed me at this, but it is very interesting: CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS.

There clearly is a need for something like CounchDB. All the impedance of mapping document data to relational is quite tiresome.

I don't think that we'll ever get rid of relational databases all together, but at the very least it would be nice to have something for the cases where it makes no sense to map to a relational database and you want to effectively retain your documents. This could be great just to effectively store service interactions. Is it really just JSON or can I stick XML in there too? JSON is great and all, but there are an awful lot of XML documents out there.

I thought document storage like this was a great idea going back to 2000-2001. I was working at eXcelon (now Sonic Software) at the time. They had a product named XIS that was an XML database built on top of eXcelon Objectstore. It's issue in general at the time was scalability - I am not quite sure what happened to it after Sonic Software (Progress) bought eXcelon.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

HOOOOOOOOOOOO

Anonymous said...

It's interesting to see CouchDB cropping up on blogs outside Damien's old Domino stomping ground.

The JSON stuff is very new, in fact I don't think there is a build with it availible yet (of course you can build it from the source). My understanding is that this is all at the REST interface level and that the database itself doesn't store JSON (I might be wrong, will have to look and see). The previous version used XML at the interface, but they've stripped that out.

CouchDB has a lot of interesting stuff going on. Until recently I was not interested in the REST interface aspect of the project, but now I'm finding REST concepts in general quite interesting. I'm not sure if the REST interface is seen as fundamental to the CouchDB way of doing things or if it's just a convenient way of doing things.

Erik Onnen said...

Man, beating on RDBMSes seems to be all the rage these days...

http://www.jsequeira.com/blog/2007/05/09.html