Interactive CouchDB

April 3, 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.

Categories: CouchDB
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