I've been playing with
CouchDB a little recently. Its a "schema-free document-oriented database", which sounds pretty weird when all you've ever known is relational databases. At work, we're considering what architecture we want to go with for a new product that needs to be very flexible - the users need to be able to add fields, remove fields, and do all sorts of crazy things with the application.
One of the options we have, is to use something like CouchDB to be able to create an uber-flexible database that can evolve over time, and be very scalable. because our new product will be a SaaS one. Its pretty clear to see why CouchDB fits the bill.
Anyway, its pretty cool, and I wanted to see if I could get started creating a little application in Rails using CouchDB on the back end... It was pretty slow going until I came across this fantastic
PeepCode Screencast This screencast goes through the basics of CouchDB, and then goes on to build a nifty notes-esque web application using a CouchDB gem called
CouchRest.
Its a quality peepcode, and the CouchRest gem looks like its really going to help me :)
It'll be interesting to see what kind of take up CouchDB or other schema-free cloud computing databases get in the .NET world, I don't see much happening out there at the moment.
Anyway, watch out for my killer CouchDB-based rails application, coming soon (yeah right!)