Joe Lennon

In this developerWorks article, I explore the concepts behind Apache CouchDB – an open source, document-oriented database management system. CouchDB uses a RESTful JSON API and JavaScript views to interact with and report on the data stored in the database. Unlike the relational model, the model CouchDB is built on is designed specifically for use in document-oriented web applications such as blogs, wikis and discussion forums. This makes it an exciting prospect as a potential de-facto database for publishing-oriented web applications. The following is the abstract from IBM developerWorks:

Relational databases define a strict structure and provide a rigid way to maintain data for a software application. Apache’s open source CouchDB offers a new method of storing data, in what is referred to as a schema-free document-oriented database model. Instead of the highly structured data storage of a relational model, CouchDB stores data in a semi-structured fashion, using a JavaScript-based view model for generating structured aggregation and report results from these semi-structured documents. CouchDB has been developed from the ground up with Web applications as the primary focus and has its sights on becoming the de-facto database for Web application development.

Read the article in full at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-couchdb/