Tim Anglade writes:
I’ve always strongly felt that using NOSQL wasn’t so much a choice as a necessity. That most successful NOSQL deployments start with the intimate knowledge that your set of requirements — from speed & availability to operational considerations and budget — cannot be met with a relational database, coupled with a deep understanding of the tradeoffs you are making. Among those, perhaps no tradeoff has been felt more deeply by NOSQL users worldwide, than the eponymous loss of a natural, instantaneous way of accessing your data through a structured query language. We all came up with our own remedies; more often than not, that substitute was based on MapReduce: Google’s novel, elegant way of explicitly parallelizing computation over distributed, unstructured data. But as the joke goes, it’s always been a non-starter for the more novice users out there, and where suits & ties are involved.
CouchDB Views (as our brand of MapReduce is called) come with additional concerns, as they are pre-computed and written to disk. While this is fine — and actually, extremely useful — for the use-cases and small scales a lot of Apache CouchDB deployments reside at (single instances working off a limited dataset), this behavior is somewhere North of nagging and South of suicidal for the data sizes & use-cases most Cloudant customers have to deal with. Part of the promise of our industry is — or should be, anyway — to make your life & business easier, no matter how much data you have. And so, while CouchDB Views have been, and will undoubtedly remain, an essential tool to index, filter & transform your data, once you know what to do with it; and while its various weaknesses (explicitly parallelized syntax, lengthy computation, heavy disk usage) are also the source of its most meaningful strengths (distributed processing, high performance on repeated queries, persistent transformations), we at Cloudant saw a clear opportunity to offer a novel, complementary way to interact with your data.
A way that would allow you to interact with your data instantaneously; wouldn’t force you to mess around with MapReduce jobs or complex languages; a way that would not require you to set up a third-party, financially or operationally expensive solution.
We call this way Cloudant Search. And today, we’re proud to announce its immediate availability, as a public beta.
Well, there goes the weekend!