This is a multi-day tutorial that teaches all aspects of CouchDB.

Overview

Abstract

CouchDB in Two Days is a high-volume injection of CouchDB knowledge. This course takes you from a gentle introduction into new ways of dealing with your data, over building a new kind of peer-to-peer applications using web technologies to deployment and high-performance strategies.

Prerequisites

You should bring a UNIXoid mobile computer (Windows and VMWare will do) equipped with a standard development environment (including GCC and Autotools). Bonus points for having a recent version CouchDB already installed. We’ve seen the least trouble with most recent Ubuntu and Mac OS X systems.

Target Audience

You are:

• A web developer eager to learn new tools for your upcoming (or current) projects.

• Software architect who needs to build the next killer application on the web or on users machines (in a peer-to-peer style).

• Already using CouchDB and need formal training to make sure you don’t get it wrong.

• A database administrator that is faced with running and maintaining a new style of database.

• Anything in between the above.

You should have a basic understanding of web technologies (HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, Server-Side Scripting, databases) and an open mind for a new way of thinking about data.

Schedule

This is a two day tutorial and we are splitting it up in morning and afternoon sessions. Each block ends with exercises that we review at the beginning of the next block.

Day One

Morning

Introduction to CouchDB. We’ll tell you what all the fuss is about and why you should care. We’ll then explore the REST API in various ways to give you a solid understanding of the basics and the abstractions built on top where we’ll have a closer look at Python, Ruby and PHP client libraries side by side (so nobody gets bored).

Afternoon

We take what we learned in the morning and set out to build a standalone application with CouchDB using only HTML & JavaScript. This type of application is an application in its own right, but it also teaches the foundations of data modelling in a document oriented database. What you learn here can be equally applied to traditional three-tier applications using your web-stack of choice.

Day Two

Morning

Advanced CouchDB with views and replication. CouchDB comes with a map-reduce-powered data-extraction and query facility. You learned first about view when building the CouchApp. Here we dive deep into getting the most out of your data and being really clever with views.

The second part introduces CouchDB’s excellent replication system and how it can be used to build fault-tolerant and high-performance database clusters (“make your own cloud”) to massively distributed peer-to-peer systems alike.

Afternoon

We look at CouchDB deployment. You’ll learn how to set up CouchDB for the different situations it can be used for. We show best practices and field-tested tools that go well with CouchDB.