CouchDB, our data frenemy
May 17, 2016
CouchDB, our data frenemy
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CouchDB
I am using CouchDB as the main NoSQL information database server for our product, a globally used network testing and security product. CouchDB helps us save and access thousands of documents of crucial information representing the data points and meta data of the product activities.
- Lightweight NoSQL data store.
- Can be accessed dynamically using any RESTful-API compliant software.
- Saves data in documents based on JSON structures.
- Can view and manipulate data inside your browser.
- Futon (the in-browser views manager) is not up to par. It lacks tons of needed functionality (like deleting a group of documents in one action).
- CouchDB is NoSQL, which means accessing data needs views (written in JS only). Your power of accessing data is limited to the power of your written views (so no unified way to access any types of data documents like we see in structures SQL databases).
- CouchDB software adapters are limited. You mainly have a couch-rest library for rails apps.
- Positively, it's a data store that requires a minor setup process and data can be viewed inside the browser.
- It's also free and open source, so no extra products needed to get the stack set up.
- Negatively, due to majorly lacking search capabilities, our customer support teams needed a separate solution that rides on top of the CouchDB API to be able to search and view customers' records and activities.
I have briefly used MongoDB in other products, and it proved that it had better integration capabilities with Ruby on Rails and node.js software platforms, more than CouchDB. But I never had the chance to actually replace CouchDB with MongoDB in the current product to see what improvements it could have made. But I expect API libraries support would be better.