Relax your data with CouchDB

CouchDB is serious software heresy: ditch your relational database, ditch rows and tables and foreign keys, ditch Hibernate and ORM. Ditch SQL and JDBC. Replace it with “semi-structured” data stored as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). CouchDB is a restful store from JSON documents, written in Erlang, that's fast, easy and replicated. The API is simple, RESTful HTTP requests. Find out why it might just be a great solution for your evolving data needs.

CouchDB takes a radical take on what it means to store information abandoning the constraints of tables, rows and third-normal form: CouchDB is modeled on the real world, where a document is entirely self contained. Without rows and tables, data can evolve easily over time, adding and changing document content almost at will.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, a popular functional programming language that is well known for its scalability and reliability. CouchDB databases can be replicated to any number of nodes and its basic design encompasses common problems with replication (such as conflicting updates). CouchDB's vision includes rich Ajax clients, in browser, communicating directly to CouchDB: a two tier solution.

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

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