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]

• Balaraman describes why finding CouchDB and PouchDB is like discovering buried treasure for offline sync [Balaraman on Medium] 

• 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] 

• Heliomar Peña shares their own recipe for a free, self-hosted Obsidian Sync using CouchDB, NordVPN Meshnet and Deno [Heliomar Peña on Medium] 

• 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

• Chirag shows viewers how to backup and restore CouchDB [Chirag Tutorial on YouTube]

• Join Chirag to learn how to install and set up CouchDB on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS [Chirag Tutorial on YouTube]

• Follow along step-by-step with the Devnami channel to set up a CouchDB server on an Azure virtual machine [Devnami on YouTube] 

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!

It’s a wrap on the spookiest month of the year! 🎃 The CouchDB community has been getting up to quite a bit. The blog has a brand-new user story from Simon Lucy, we learn how a CouchDB is used in a social media research project and see it compared to popular database options.

Blog Articles

• Longtime CouchDB user Simon Lucy shares his story and shows us what features make knowledge management app zettel.io so reliable and robust [Simon Lucy on the CouchDB Blog]

• Sohail Saifi’s team show us how CouchDB and PouchDB enabled an offline-first application — and show off the business impact of their decision [Sohail Saifi on Medium]
  • This article was published in June

• Vinaykumar Chitukoori details how they configured and used CouchDB in a research project to understand the impact of social media discourse and the adoption of renewable energy [full paper available via Research Gate]

• Srujan compares seven databases in seven weeks: find out how CouchDB fares alongside other popular options [Srujan on Medium]

• Sayantan Roy’s guest contribution to AI Journal examines why edge, or local-first,  is the inevitable future of secure AI  [Sayantan Roy for the AI Journal]

• Everything you need to know to start sharding in CouchDB, managing conflicts within the Fauxton UI and using CouchDB attachments has been put together by the Neighbourhoodie team this month [Neighbourhoodie Blog]

Videos

• Stacey Haysler talks databases and diversity at FOSSY 2025 in Portland: if you want to find ways to contribute to a more inclusive CouchDB community through efforts at your team, company, event or project level, this is a must-watch [Software Freedom Conservancy on YouTube]

Tools

• The Community Health Toolkit collects technologies and resources for global health equity, and primarily use CouchDB as their database of choice for offline capability and more [Community Health Toolkit] 

• Don’t miss npm security updates on Nano, Official Apache CouchDB library for Node.js [Nano readme on npm]

Thanks for keeping up with CouchDB and the community that keeps it going. If we missed anything you think should be here or have a source to check next time, let us know in the comments. See you here again next month!