It sucks to admit when you’ve made a bad decision, but step one is admitting you have a problem. My problem specifically was with what I wanted to accomplish and what CouchDB had to offer. To be clear the problem was with me and not CouchDB, its a great tool and resource for someone out there, but not for me.

context

One of my unpublished pets is a delicious clone ( live as of last weekend ) that was designed from month two to be a single user affair ( delicious data, custom spiders, reports, and a reddit cross-analysis ranking thing ). Delicious is/was a bookmarking website where you could apply arbitrary tags to bookmarks then retrieve all bookmarks related to a bookmark.

The data could be modeled as a URL has many tags and a tag has many urls. In SQL you could do something like

table BookMark:
url: text(255)
name: text(255)
date_created: text(255)

table Tags:
name: text(255)
date_created: text(255)

table BookMarks2Tags
tad_id: int
bookmark_id: int

Odd data, odd results

I can’t find the map logic I used, but the gist of it was that the results I getting back were
less then idea. It was easy to aggregate tag counts but to grab all bookmarks that had a specific tag was somewhat contorted.

Lack of straight forward documentation

Rechecking couchdb’s documentation website, I really hate information overload style doc’s. In the beginning I don’t care how something does what it does, just show me well documented examples of accomplishing the basics: Create, replace, update, delete. Probably immediately after that I’ll need how I can connect relate two entities of separate types and do CRUD on that. Rinse and repeat until I’ve made something so goddamn complicated that maybe its time to figure out how the whole mess works.

Error logging from hell

This could be the fault of the Ubuntu package manager for CouchDB or just my cluelessness, but I absolutely hate 5-10 page long exception traces that include a lot of stuff I don’t give a crap about… just tell me I’m an idiot and their’s a runtime syntax error on line two or the road peg doesn’t go in the square hole.

Lack of python support

To be fair, CouchDBKit rocks and did take some of the sting out of learning a new technology, but in earlier 2011 late 2010 I found the python CouchDB view interpreter left a lot to be desired ( partially due to CouchDB’s excessive error vomit traces ). Never mind that typing in whitespace sensitive code into a textarea field for adhoc query testing was entertaining.

Alright, I think I’m done ranting. Does this mean I’m going to completely swear off CouchDB? No. I keep proclaiming I’m never going to do anymore PHP contracts, and then the next thing you know I’m staring at an IDE full of PHP 5.0 ( for non PHP people PHP 5.0 was as good as MySQLDB 5.0… for non MySQL people, MySQL 5.0 was scary ).