Daily Archives: September 4, 2014

CouchDB Weekly News, September 04, 2014

Releases

Major Discussions

Vote: Release of Apache CouchDB 1.6.1-rc.4 (will be released as Apache CouchDB 1.6.1) (see thread)

The vote has passed, Apache CouchDB 1.6.1 has been released.

Website Refresh: updated “How to Contribute” section (see thread)

The section about ways to contribute to CouchDB has been updated. The goal was to better emphasise

  1. CouchDB’s focus on building a welcoming, supportive, inclusive, and
    diverse community (see also our recently published Code of Conduct and Diversity statement for background information) and
  2. our valuing of non-coding contributions.

If you want to help us develop CouchDB or support our marketing efforts, we invite you to check out the updated page and get in touch with us!

Is it possible to measure disk space of documents in a view? (see thread)

Question: Is there a way to measure the amount of disk space used by the documents returned by a particular view? As an example, let’s say all documents in my database are tagged with a userId and I have a view that returns all
documents by userId. Now I want to measure the amount of space used by
userId=100? Is this possible?

Answer:

  • One approach could be to find a reliable / sufficient way to calculate an arbitrary document’s disk size and emitting such value in the map
    function (among whatever else is already being emitted), and then
    calculating that specific sum on reduce. Though, it’s not clear if this works for attachments as well.
  • In any case, users also have to account for the append-only way of
    things, which will incur a overhead of up to whatever the compaction
    threshold is.

validate_doc_update design function (see thread)

Question: a user is writing a validate_doc_update function which they want to use for validating that document inserts comply with a strict schema. Since there is no way to pass parameters to the validate_doc_update function, they were thinking of fetching the schema (contained in a local JSON file) asynchronously and found they can request the schema once and then store it. So, there would be one initial performance hit in fetching the file, and from then on it would be saved. Question is whether there would be a better way to do this.

Answer 1:

  • There is no way to either act asynchronously in validate_doc_update functions or to reliably cache some data for other runs. In this case it sounded like the user is using a glitch for your cache, it’s not recommended to rely on that.
  • If users don’t want to update the function itself there is an easy way to include the schema directly into the design document as part of design document JSON, and this can be required during validate_doc_update.
  • The reasons for this:
    • This caching behavior is not intended at all, and
    • Validate_doc_update responds sooner (synchronously) than the schema is fetched, so validation always succeeds in the first run.

Answer 2:

  • It’s also possible is to have the schema in your design document, like it is
    done here. The design functions are executed in the scope of the design document (although there may be exceptions), so “this” is the design document. So the couchapp-schema can use this.schema[newDoc.schema] to get the schema.
  • Users would then still have to update the design document, but they don’t have to touch the validation function.

Releases in the CouchDB Universe

Opinions and other News in the CouchDB Universe

Use Cases, Questions and Answers

no public answer yet:

For more new questions and answers about CouchDB, see these search results.

Get involved!

If you want to get into working on CouchDB:

  • We have an infinite number of open contributor positions on CouchDB. Submit a pull request and join the project!
  • Do you want to help moving the CouchDB docs translation forward? We’d love to have you in our L10n team! See our current status and languages we’d like to provide CouchDB docs in on this page. If you’d like to help, don’t hesitate to contact the L10n mailing list on l10n@couchdb.apache.org or ping Andy Wenk (awenkhh on IRC).

We’d be happy to have you!

New Committer

  • Sebastian Rothbucher (IRC nic: sebastianrothbuc; Twitter; Apache ID: sebastianro) has been elected as a CouchDB committer. Welcome to CouchDB, Sebastian!

Events

Job opportunities for people with CouchDB skills

Time to relax!

  • “I am not awesome. I am not a rockstar, superstar, ninja, or guru either. The ‘cult of awesome’ that too frequently crops up in the technology industry is a problem and it breeds a culture of egos and aggrandising that can be self defeating.” – Not everything is awesome
  • “I think I realised after a while that what I saw in other people who I thought had a plan was passion. Perhaps the passion I didn’t know how to direct earlier on. I don’t believe we need plans, we need something that drives us, something that gives us that feeling in our gut that we maybe can’t explain.” – Plans
  • 50 people were asked to walk into a room filled with balloons. This is what happened next
  • Copy Paste Soul: Music to … Emotivate (around 24:00 is a good spot)

… and also in the news