Releases

• Apache CouchDB 1.6.1 released
• Homebrew has CouchDB 1.6.1 now as well – `brew install|upgrade couchdb` as reqd.
• Ubuntu packages are now up here

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

• new Docker image for CouchDB – based on Debian, 20% smaller and following Docker best practices
• add-cors-to-couchdb – eases CORS configuration for CouchDB
• couchdb-rev 0.0.5 – will let you setup revisions for couchdb designs
• pouchdb-update 1.0.5 – PouchDB plug-in that allows you to re-use your CouchDB update functions on the client side
• pouchdb-list 1.0.4 – allows you to re-use your CouchDB list functions on the client side
• couchdb-resp-completer 1.0.0 – builds a complete CouchDB-like response object from a very marginal one (can be just a string at first)
• couchdb-eval 1.0.4 – compiles a piece of code to a function object, providing a CouchDB-like JavaScript context
• couch-proxy-auth 1.0.1 – creates CouchDB Proxy Authentication Headers

Opinions and other News in the CouchDB Universe

• Apache CouchDB: The Definitive Introduction
• Getting started with PouchDB and CouchDB (video tutorial)
• CouchDB 1.6.0 on Travis CI’s build environment

Use Cases, Questions and Answers

• Use Case: Tracking Expenses with CouchDB and AngularJS
• Use Case: a detailed introduction on both setting up an SSL-protected CouchDB instance using stud, and how to hot migrate between CouchDB instances behind it: Migrating a Production CouchDB database with Joyent and Stud
• Stack Overflow: CouchDB and Cloudant Security
• Stack Overflow: View is running in CouchDB but returns empty result
• Stack Overflow: CouchDB retrieving multiple attachments with multiple documents
• Stack Overflow: CouchDB – Getting the total of distinct values
• Stack Overflow: Remove old 1.0.1 CouchDB databases
• Stack Overflow: How to post a json file with documents to CouchDB

no public answer yet:

• Stack Overflow: Elasticsearch cross data center replication
• Stack Overflow: Error Installing CouchDB River plugin on Mac
• Stack Overflow: CouchDB view results contain “missing” docs after purging

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

• September 09, Hamburg, Germany: CouchDB Meetup
• September 11, Berlin, Germany: Time to relax! CouchDB Hack Night
• September 15, Calgary, Canada: Introduction to Cloudant, a fully-managed NoSQL database-as-a-servi­­ce (DBaaS)
• September 17, London, United Kingdom: September meetup – Cloudant and developing on IBM Bluemix

Job opportunities for people with CouchDB skills

• Software Engineer in Test, New York, NY, USA
• Senior Software Engineer, New York, NY, USA
• Sr. IT Operations Engineer, New York, NY, USA
• Developer, New York, NY, USA
• Backend Java Developer, San Francisco, CA, USA
• Senior Full Stack Developer, New York, NY, USA
• Principal Application Software Engineer Job, San Diego, CA, USA
• Solution Lead/Technical Project Manager, Middlesex, MA, USA
• Web Developer – Full Stack, Chicago, IL, USA
• DevOps Cloud Solution Architect, Tampa, FL, USA
• Software Engineer, Menlo Park or Pasadena, CA, USA
• Senior javascript engineer, Berlin, Germany

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

• Milky Way part of newly discovered supercluster
• This is why you never end up hiring good developers