Relax, It’s CouchDB

CouchDB is a NoSQL database solution, which means it supports persistence of data. But you don’t have to spend a lot of time designing the relational structure upfront. This makes starting development with a NoSQL system easier than typical SQL databases because you don’t have to spend time defining relationships.

Also, many NoSQL solutions favor availability over consistency. NoSQL databases tend to fall more in the camp of eventual consistency, where they will eventually return the latest version of a record.

CouchDB is easy to install. Just download the app and run it.

CouchDB has an easy-to-use UI for interacting with it. This built-in UI is called Fauxton, and you can view the API by going to http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/. The Fauxton UI is kind of like SQL Server Management Studio, but for CouchDB.

Once you have CouchDB up and running, you can create a database.

Creating documents is pretty straightforward. There is an API for creating documents, but you can also create a document using the Fauxton UI.

After creating some documents, we can view them in the web UI.

Now that we have created a few documents, we can write our first queries.

Let’s write a simple query that will return only objects with a type equal to “contact”.

CouchDB is very easy to get going with a simple setup, and its query language is pretty straightforward. When to use CouchDB? I have never used it in a production system, I was more interested in it from a learning perspective. CouchDB seems like an interesting NoSQL option, but I would be more inclined to choose PostgreSQL with Marten given my knowledge of both.

Are you using CouchDB on a project? How is it working out for you?