The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak.

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak.

March 2008 will be a month of publicity for CouchDB. I will be giving a total of three presentations around the globe, the northern hemisphere, less then half of that, actually. Anyway.

March 1st, 2008 — Chemnitzer Linux Tage

As early as 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I’ll be giving the 45 minute version of my Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB talk to a crowd of hopefully awake Linux enthusiasts. The conference is only 5€ (3€ for students), so be sure to show up! The presentation will be in German and so is the information page.

March 7th, 2008 — O’Reilly ETech — San Diego

March 2008 will be a month of publicity for CouchDB. I will be giving a total of three presentations around the globe, the northern hemisphere, less then half of that, actually. Anyway.

March 1st, 2008 — Chemnitzer Linux Tage

As early as 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I’ll be giving the 45 minute version of my Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB talk to a crowd of hopefully awake Linux enthusiasts. The conference is only 5€ (3€ for students), so be sure to show up! The presentation will be in German and so is the information page.

March 7th, 2008 — O’Reilly ETech — San Diego

March 2008 will be a month of publicity for CouchDB. I will be giving a total of three presentations around the globe, the northern hemisphere, less then half of that, actually. Anyway.

March 1st, 2008 — Chemnitzer Linux Tage

As early as 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I’ll be giving the 45 minute version of my Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB talk to a crowd of hopefully awake Linux enthusiasts. The conference is only 5€ (3€ for students), so be sure to show up! The presentation will be in German and so is the information page.

March 7th, 2008 — O’Reilly ETech — San Diego

Yes, old news, but woohoo, big news. The Happy New Year is kicking off nicely. All the best for 2008!

Yes, old news, but woohoo, big news. The Happy New Year is kicking off nicely. All the best for 2008!

Yes, old news, but woohoo, big news. The Happy New Year is kicking off nicely. All the best for 2008!

This is a follow-up piece to an earlier rant:

We are hitting a few walls with a CouchDB deployment and both Damien and I are a bit puzzled. This posting tries to attract someone with a clue to help us out. Our problems might result from not understanding the documentation correctly, but with evidently inaccurate material, we stand little chance

Long story short: We’ve got it all sorted out.

Memory Hogging Spidermonkey

Sam Ruby relayed a hint by “a Mozilla Developer”. Invoking Spidermonkey with the -b parameter and a value of 1000000, we are able to keep the memory footprint constant. We haven’t

This is a follow-up piece to an earlier rant:

We are hitting a few walls with a CouchDB deployment and both Damien and I are a bit puzzled. This posting tries to attract someone with a clue to help us out. Our problems might result from not understanding the documentation correctly, but with evidently inaccurate material, we stand little chance

Long story short: We’ve got it all sorted out.

Memory Hogging Spidermonkey

Sam Ruby relayed a hint by “a Mozilla Developer”. Invoking Spidermonkey with the -b parameter and a value of 1000000, we are able to keep the memory footprint constant. We haven’t

This is a follow-up piece to an earlier rant:

We are hitting a few walls with a CouchDB deployment and both Damien and I are a bit puzzled. This posting tries to attract someone with a clue to help us out. Our problems might result from not understanding the documentation correctly, but with evidently inaccurate material, we stand little chance

Long story short: We’ve got it all sorted out.

Memory Hogging Spidermonkey

Sam Ruby relayed a hint by “a Mozilla Developer”. Invoking Spidermonkey with the -b parameter and a value of 1000000, we are able to keep the memory footprint constant. We haven’t

My first Podcast, yeah!

Early the a week I recorded a short introduction to CouchDB for PHP Abstract.

If you like to quote, or copy or anything (after all this is under a Creative Commons license), here’s the transcript:

CouchDB

CouchDB is a new database system that breaks with a lot of traditions. Prepare to be confused or even offended. While a lot is different from traditional data management systems, the core concepts should be familiar to you.

Try to forget, just for a moment, all you know about SQL, relations, replication and all simple and advanced techniques you use to solve your problems

We are hitting a few walls with a CouchDB deployment and both Damien and I are a bit puzzled. This posting tries to attract someone with a clue to help us out. Our problems might result from not understanding the documentation correctly, but with evidently inaccurate material, we stand little chance. Here it goes.

Spidermonkey hogs memory

Or its garbage collection is a little ineffective. CouchDB uses Spidermonkey, Mozilla’s Javascript engine to create views on its databases. The user provides a Javascript function and CouchDB uses Spidermonkey to determine which documents to include in a View. The Javascript script that evaluates and executes the user’s function runs as a daemon.

We have a global variable there, map_results

To illustrate how easy and straightforward writing applications for CouchDB is, we are going to build a simple todo-list application in Javascript. You should be familiar with HTML and Javascript and the DOM. You do not need any Ajax experience. Although we are going to use it, all will be abstracted away.

The interface is quite plain, as is the functionality. This is only to demonstrate how to work with CouchDB and not meant as a real application. We could turn this into something nice with some spit & polish.

How it works

We take a top level view here, working our way from the user’s

CouchDB got its own TCP port assignment from the IANA. Yeah! The latest release (0.7.2) already configures your default installation to use this port and the accompanying documentation and the wiki should be up to date as well. A big thanks to Noah Slater for taking care of the procedure.

Oh, and it is 5984.

Damien Katz and the CouchDB development team are proud to announce:

CouchDB version 0.7.0 is now available.

This release is a major milestone in the project’s history.

Key features include:

• a REST API using JSON instead of XML for data transport,
• a JavaScript view engine based on Mozilla Spidermonkey,
• a GNU Autotools build system supporting most POSIX systems (Noah Slater),
• a built-in administration interface (

Thank you Frankfurt, what an evening! Thanks a lot for the invitation and my trip-sponsors. In fact the people and venue were so nice, I am seriously looking for an excuse to go again.

For housekeeping, here are the promised slides (PDF, 0.662 MB, sans images). In Some Context I wrote:

I rarely see the point of posting the slides of a presentation for people who didn’t see the original presentation. Yet, this is often requested. I don’t have a problem with posting my […] slides […], but they are of little value without context and I do have a problem with posting things of little value, so here’s the context.

And it goes on to comment the slides I used

The kind folks at the PHP Usergroup Frankfurt invited me to talk about CouchDB. We meet on November 8th between 19:30 and 20:00 at the Brotfabrik in Frankfurt. If you are in the area and like to hear about CouchDB, feel free to join us.

I will be presenting CouchDB’s core concepts, its recent improvements and the programming interface to give you an overview. Building on that, I will explain how to architect CouchDB applications and show best practices for writing them not forgetting how to do all that from PHP.

In case you forgot:

CouchDB is designed for highly concurrent, distributed and fault tolerant systems. The core principles for scaling database applications are the foundation of CouchDB’s feature set. It

As I mentioned in the Post Scriptum of an earlier post, JavaScript is not the only language that you can create CouchDB views with. You can now use PHP, too.

Here is how views work again: You specify a JavaScript function that receives a document parameter (which is a JSON object). You can do whatever to that object and return it again. Or you don’t return anything. When a new document is added to a CouchDB database, it gets passed to the JavaScript function and, depending on its return value, is included into the view that is associated with the function &endash; or not.

function(doc)
{
  if("Value" == doc.field) {
   return doc;
  }
}

This function adds the full document to the view when it has a field called field and when that has the value

I just sent this message to the brand new CouchDb mailinglist:

Dear Couch Potatoes (or something), I updated the CouchDb PHP Library and the Demo application BugShrink (our bug-tracker) to the new JSON API.

They are up in a separate Google Code Project. Check out the code at Subversion Repositiry">http://couchprojects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ and the project pages at http://code.google.com/p/couchprojects/.

Enjoy, Jan

While not yet released, the current SVN version of CouchDb is