Interactive CouchDB

April 3rd, 2009 by kowsik

I’ve blogged about CouchDB before and we use it on pcapr. While I love CouchDB, it takes a a certain amount of unlearning, especially if you have years of SQL under your belt. What if you can visualize the internals of CouchDB in an interactive way?

I originally wrote this for an internal demo to get people to try out CouchDB interactively without necessarily having to install. The other reason was for me to grok the incremental reduce (a.k.a as rereduce). While the documentation has gotten a whole lot better over the last few months, nothing like an interactive way to visualize all the gory details of collation, map/reduce, etc.

Interactive CouchDB is an emulator written in 100% JavaScript with tons of jQuery thrown in. It also implements the collation schemes as well as the map/reduce algorithms. While it doesn’t demonstrate replication, conflict management and a host of other capabilities in CouchDB, it does strive to illustrate concepts like schema-less JSON documents, map/reduce and how these things fit together.

You can try out the emulator here. Let us know what you think.

Update Apr 14, 2009: We’ve moved this emulator to GitHub under Apache License and this is now maintained by Jan Lehnardt.

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15 Responses

  1. Andreas

    Found it on the mailing-list. This is great stuff - thx for this.

  2. Peter

    Hey, this is neat. A nice way to wrap your head around it indeed.

  3. Per

    Sweet! Many thank’s for this, it helped me feel a little less stupid. :-)

  4. Umut Utkan

    Thanks, this made me understand a little bit further what CouchDB is for:)

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  9. Bruno Pedro

    This is a fantastic tool. It saved me countless hours when trying to implement new views.

    Thanks!

  10. Rick

    Thanks for the great post, the tool is really nice!

    Rick

  11. joshua paul

    Very cool! We have been inspired by this to offer: http://couch-db-hosting.blogspot.com/

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    […] http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2007/10/couchdb-joins (англ.) – примеры http://labs.mudynamics.com/2009/04/03/interactive-couchdb/ (англ.) – показывает, какие map/reduce к какой выборке […]

  13. Nick

    FYI: you might want to reference your own copy of json2.js or, if you are, remove the alert that’s at the beging of the file that says “remove this alert before deployment.”

  14. kowsik

    Ah yes. Forgot that they changed this. Thanks for reminding me.

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