Things we don't like about Couchdb

We love Couchdb, it is a workhorse, and we use it on a lot of projects. Obviously it does not fit everywhere. There are some places where it just does not cut it. I am trying to document a few issues we’ve been having with couchdb.

Building Views

Views are built at run request time. We think that should be an option

The problem here is that when a view is being built it just blocks any operation on that design document, which means other requests are blocked as well (unless they go to a different design doc).

We work around this problem by pre-warming all the instances, after the documents are loaded into couchdb.

Query API

View query API is quite powerful but solving all problems with map-reduce is not trivial. Recently we had to implement a functionality to find if a date range overlaps with something else. Here is the gist that does something like that.

As you can see we had to emit all the days for the network and query the view with a startkey and endkey. This is way too complicated than a simple SQL query to acheive the same result. I am lucky that my granularity is days, if you want to find the range over a hourly basis, then it is much harder. The views will get much slower and (likely) take larger space.

The view collation is quite useful and powerful, but is it very restrictive. Array or String keys are used more often than Hash Keys(pretty much useless) for view collation to retrieve a result set. Even Array keys have limitations. for example if your view emits

['abcnews', 'christiane'], ['cnn', 'christiane'], ['cnn', 'fionnuala']

then

startkey: ['cnn'], endkey : ['cnn', {}] would match

['cnn', 'christiane'], ['cnn', 'fionnuala']

But you will have to write a new view if you want to search by the newscaster. i.e. you can’t do

startkey: [{}, 'christiane'], endkey : [{}, 'fionnuala'] or

startkey: [{}, 'christiane'], endkey : [{}, 'christiane']

Date Support

Date Support is pretty primitive. I cringe everytime I have to tell my team that dates in couchdb have to be in specific format. It may more be an issue with javascript date handling. But CouchDB spidermonkey supports only one date format. I do not think couch should go towards the MongoDB Date data-type, but having Date.parse support multiple formats, or even iso8601 would be really useful.

As you can see in the gist above, we manually parse the date and build the date object. This is error prone, there are atleast 2 javascript subtleties there. (Hint: parseInt(date, 10) and javascript month being 0 indexed)

Others

There are some other issues that do not climb high on my radar.

Sometimes, hard problems need a small experienced team, and a new perspective.

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