Question

I was looking into the possibility of using CouchDB. I heard that it was similar to Lotus Notes which everyone loves to hate. Is this true?

Answer 1

Development of Lotus Notes began over 20 years ago, with version 1 released in 1989. It was developed by Ray Ozzie, currently Chief Software Architect for Microsoft.

Lotus Notes (the client) and Domino (the server) have been around for a long time and are mature well featured products. It has:

• A full client server stack with rapid application design and deployment of document oriented databases.
• A full public key infrastructure for security and encryption.
• A robust replication model and active active clustering across heterogeneous platforms (someone once showed a domino cluster with an xbox and a huge AIX server).
• A built in native directory for managing users that can also be accessed over LDAP.
• A built in native mail system that can scale to manage millions of users with multi GB mail files, with live server access or replicated locally for off-line access. This can interface with standard internet mail through SMTP and also has POP and IMAP access built in. The mail infrastructure is a core feature that is available to all applications built on Notes Domino (any document in a database can be mailed to any other database with a simple doc.send() command).
• A built in HTTP stack that allows server hosted databases to be accessed over the web.
• A host of integration options for accessing, transferring and interoperating with RDBMS and ERP systems, with a closely coupled integration with DB2 available allowing Notes databases to be backed by a relational store where desired.

Backwards compatibility has always been a strong feature of Notes Domino and it is not uncommon to find databases that were developed for version 3 running flawlessly in the most up to date versions. IBM puts a huge amount of effort into this and it has a large bearing on how the product currently operates.

–

CouchDB was created by Damien Katz, starting development in 2004. He had previously worked for IBM on Notes Domino, developing templates and eventually completely rewriting one of the core features, the formula engine, for ND6.

CouchDB shares a basic concept of a document oriented database with views that Notes Domino has.

In this model ‘documents’ are just arbitrary collections of values that are stored some how. In CouchDB the documents are JSON objects of arbitrary complexity. In Notes the values are simple name value pairs, where the values can be strings, numbers, dates or arrays of those.

Views are indexes of the documents in the database, displaying certain value, calculating others and excluding undesired docs. Once the index is build they are incrementally updated when any document in the database changes (created updated or deleted).

In CouchDB views are build by running a mapping function on each document in the database. The mapping function calls an emit method with a JSON object for every index entry it wants to create for the given document. This JSON object can be arbitrarily complex. CouchDB can then run a second reducing function on the mapped index of the view.

In Notes Domino views are built by running a select function (written in Notes Domino formula language) on each document in the database. The select function simply defines if the document should be in the view or not. Notes Domino view design also defines a number of columns for the view. Each column has a formula that is run against the selected document to determine the value for that column.

CouchDB is able to produce much more sophisticated view indexes than Notes Domino can.

CouchDB also has a replication system.

–

Summary ( TL;DR ) : CouchDB is brand new software that is developing a core that has a similar conceptual but far more sophisticated design to that used in Lotus Notes Domino. Lotus Notes Domino is a mature fully featured product that is capable of being deployed today. CouchDB is starting from scratch, building a solid foundation for future feature development. Lotus Notes Domino is continuing to develop new features, but is doing so on a 20 year old platform that strives to maintain backwards compatibility. There are features in Notes Domino that you might wish were in CouchDB, but there are also features in Notes Domino that are anachronistic in today’s world.