Updated 2009-08-09 (originally posted 2009-06-30 ) — CouchDB — 6 min read

CouchDB is a document-oriented database. It has no rows or tables. Instead CouchDB is a collection of JSON documents. It uses a map-reduce pattern to index data. Queries in CouchDB pull data from what are essentially stored procedures called views. A view is made up of a map function and optionally a reduce function. Ninety percent of the time all you need is the map function, so I will focus on map-only views here.

A map function is a JavaScript function that takes a single document as an argument and emits any number of key/value pairs. Both the key and the value can be any JSON value you choose. The map function is run on every document in the database individually and the emitted key/value pairs are used to construct an index of your data.

A Simple Example

Imagine you have a database with user records and you want a view of those records using the last name of each user as keys.

The above map function will produce and index something like the one below. Because doc is used as a value for each entry the entire content of each JSON document will be accessible as the indexed values.

Notice that the map function checks each document for a last_name attribute before emitting a key/value pair. There may be documents in the database that are not user records. By performing that check the view excludes any non-user-record documents from the resulting index.

If you include the couch.js library in a web page you can create client-side queries to pull data from CouchDB over HTTP. The function below will fetch all of the user records from your database by returning the value of each key/value pair emitted by the view above.

Map functions operate on one document at a time and cannot access data from other documents. The advantage of this is that the functions can process data in any order and can run on any piece of a data set independent of the rest of the set. CouchDB builds static indexes from the output of view map functions so that queries against those views will run quickly. When any documents change CouchDB can incrementally rebuild the indexes for just those documents without having to rebuild entire indexes from scratch.

The CouchDB design gets you great performance on large data sets. But it means that you cannot pass dynamic parameters to your map function when you run a query. You cannot ask for it to emit only user records with a given last name unless you want to maintain a special view for that particular last name. In most cases it is not practical to build separate views for every query that you might want to run someday. So what you can do is to run a query against the general purpose view above and request only key/value pairs that match a particular key.

This client code creates a query that requests data from the last_names view with a key parameter. CouchDB will only send back key/value pairs with keys that match the key parameter. In this case the query will return all user records with last names matching the last_name argument.

In a more advanced case you may want to take the first few letters of a last name and look up user records that match.

Data returned by a query is always sorted by key. In the case where the keys are strings the sorting will be lexicographic. The startkey and endkey parameters restrict the results of the query to key/value pairs that fall in the given range according to CouchDB's sort order.

When the above function is given the query string "Ha", it will fetch documents with keys sorted after "Ha" lexicographically, e.g. "Hallett", "Hathaway", and "Hazzold". The endkey is created by appending "\u9999" to the startkey . "\u9999" is a unicode character that comes after most other characters in lexicographic order and that is unlikely to appear in a data set. Effectively the string "Ha\u9999" sorts after every other string that begins with "Ha", but before any string that starts with "Hb".

Note that CouchDB uses the Unicode Collation Algorithm to sort strings. Sorting comes out differently than you may be used to if your are accustomed to the ASCII way. UCA collation is intended to mimic the order of strings you would see in a dictionary. For example, two strings that differ only in case will appear together in sorted order. The lower-case string will appear immediately before the upper-case string. So if you force your startkey to lower-case and your endkey to upper-case you will get case-insensitive matches. See the CouchDB wiki for more details.

Search by Keyword

Indexing text content can be a hard problem because you need a large index if you want to query data by arbitrary keywords or substrings. Fortunately CouchDB excels at managing large indexes.

Here is a map function that creates an index of all the words that appear in the text field of every document in a database.

The code splits text on word boundaries stripping out non-alphanumeric characters. It runs the resulting list of tokens through a unique filter so that only one index key is produced for each word in the text of a single document.

This is an example of a view that emits more than one key/value pair for each document. The values in each pair are the same for the same document. But a different key is recorded for each word in the document's text attribute. The index that would be created by this view for a document with the text "Live long and prosper" is below.

To look up documents that contain a given keyword you just need to create a query with that keyword as the key parameter. But what if you want to look for documents that contain a list of keywords? You could create index keys for every combination of words in each document. But that index would grow exponentially and might get to be unreasonably large. A better way might be to pick one keyword to perform your query and then to use client code to select the documents that match all of the keywords out of the results returned by CouchDB.

When you want more dynamic data processing than you can get with pure-CouchDB views, some client-side processing can make up the difference nicely. From a perspective of deploying applications leveraging your users' CPU cycles for data processing can really help getting your application to scale.

There is another approach to full text search documented on the CouchDB wiki.

Search by Substring

Maybe keyword search isn't good enough. Maybe you need to be able to search for occurrences of any substring in a data set.

For each document, this map function emits a key/value pair for every possible substring that runs to the end of the document's text. The idea is that the beginning of any substring in the data set can be lined up with the beginning of one of these keys. Here is an example of the index created for a document with the text "Hello, world!":

The substring that you want to search for can begin at any character within some document's text. It may or may not run until the end of that document's text field. We have an index with the beginning characters for every possible substring. So we can create a query that asks for a key range that encompasses both the given substring and a substring that runs all the way to the end of the document text.

CouchDB does not just sort data when responding to queries. In its internal representation indexes are always sorted by key. So a query with a key range targets a contiguous block of data from the database. Because of that CouchDB can serve up a key range very efficiently.

Just as with the keyword search, if you want to search for documents that match a list of substrings then get the matches for one of the substrings from CouchDB and use client code to select results that contain all of the rest of the given substrings.

If the text of your documents tends to be very long you can avoid a lot of really long keys by limiting the lengths of substring keys in your view. In that case make sure to truncate the key parameters in your queries so that they are not longer than the index keys.

Appendix: Helper Function Definitions

Some of the functions that I used in the examples above are not built into JavaScript or couch.js. Here are definitions of those functions for reference.

Given an attribute name, dot returns a function that when given an object returns the value of the specified attribute. This function is used in examples above to get the value attributes of rows fetched by CouchDB queries.

map is an Array method that given a function that takes a single argument returns a new array formed by applying the given function to every element of the original array in turn.

reduce is an Array method that given an initial value and a function that takes two arguments returns a single value produced by applying the given function to every element of the array in turn with the value from the previous function invocation and returning the last result.

select is an Array method that given a test function returns a new array made up of only elements in the original array that pass the test.

uniq is an Array method that returns a new array with any duplicate values from the original array removed.