Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Day 2: Creating and Querying Views

In CouchDB, a view is a window into the documents contained in a database. Views are the principal way that documents are accessed in all but trivial cases, such as those individual CRUD operations you saw on Day 1. Today, you’ll discover how to create the functions that make up a view. You’ll also learn how to perform ad hoc queries against views using cURL. Finally, you’ll import music data, which will make the views more salient and demonstrate how to use couchrest, a popular Ruby library for working with CouchDB.

Accessing Documents Through Views

A view consists of mapper and reducer functions that are used to generate an ordered list of key-value pairs. Both keys and values can be any valid JSON. The ...