CouchDB Digest — December ’25 + January ’26 Omnibus 

Hello and welcome to 2026 and the first CouchDB Digest of the year! This is a bumper edition that includes December’s highlights too. First things first: have you taken part in the 2025–2026 Annual Apache CouchDB User Survey? Share it far and wide: we can’t wait to hear from you!

This month there’s also a very special update about CouchDB’s sibling technology:

Count yourself among the amazing volunteer team that brings PouchDB to the world, and join the bi-weekly triage sessions to help prune, prioritise and work through the PouchDB backlog! 

It all happens in the #pouchdb channel in the CouchDB community Slack — come participate:

  • February 9, 2026 from 8-9am UTC
  • February 16, 2026 from 3-4pm UTC
  • March 2, 2026 from 8-9am UTC

In the last active session, contributors closed 15 issues and 3 PRs! 🙌 

These are the biggest updates in the CouchDB community. Read on for a video-packed edition that covers why local first is the future and where CouchDB fits in, plus setup tutorials, deployment options and more.

Blog Articles

  • Local-first home assistants demonstrate the benefits of skipping the cloud, and Andrea Griffiths explains why local first is the future of software [Andrea Griffiths on Github Blog]
  • Steven Deobald introduces the local first spectrum and why FOSS is the natural fit when it comes to owning your own data [Steven Deobald]

Videos

  • Recordings from the 2026 edition of Sync Conf are up! Topics include conflicts, sync engines, persistence and more [Local-First Conf on YouTube]

Tools

Thank you for keeping up with the CouchDB ecosystem; see you here next month!

CouchDB Digest — November 2025

Hello and welcome to the last digest to be posted in 2025! This month Martin Junek shares their CouchDB user story and transports us to New Zealand, we find a new way to get Obsidian Sync working with CouchDB and get a peek at Open Telemetry’s CouchDB receiver updates.

3.5.1 has also been released this month — don’t miss the release notes! We also recommend taking a look at some more in-depth articles on QuickJS from the Neighbourhoodie and Cloudant teams. 

Clouseau 3.0.0 is here too: it’s the Lucene-based full-text engine you can use for search in CouchDB. 

Blog Articles

  • Martin Junek is the latest in the community to share a user story — discover how eCatch New Zealand uses CouchDB and PouchDB to automate paperwork for fishing vessels as they drift off and online [Martin Junek on the CouchDB Blog]
  • Karl Biron talks about MAD-CAT, the utility they authored to simulate the “-MEOW” attacks of the early 2020s that CouchDB was briefly susceptible to [Karl Biron on Trustwave] 
  • Glynn Bird shares deep-dives into MapReduce “reducers” and bulk delete features that hold true for both CouchDB and Cloudant users [Glynn Bird on the Cloudant Blog]
    • A huge thanks to Glynn for reaching out and making sure these get shared widely! That’s why these articles, published earlier this year, are appearing in November’s digest.

Videos

Tools

  • Open Telemetry has shipped updates to the CouchDB receiver that supports CouchDB versions 2.3+ and 3.1+ [Open Telemetry on GitHub] 

Thanks for stopping by to catch up with all things CouchDB. Let us know in the comments if there’s any articles, videos or tools that we missed this month. See you here again in the new year!