February 22nd, 2011

February is all about relationships. Classically, databases have been too, being the matchmaker that maintains structure in the lives of data. But these modern times accept a more promiscuous data, with the noSQL movement putting data in the unrestrained document. One such libertine, CouchDB, has developers tickled-pink with it's Apache backing, performance, and flexibility. This month, NYPHP welcomes Burlington PHP co-founder and noSQL indulger Bradley Holt to enamor us with this new technology, and determine if noSQL will be your development shop's next - valentine.

CouchDB is a document-oriented database that stores JSON documents, has a RESTful HTTP API, and is queried using MapReduce views. Each of these properties alone, especially MapReduce views, may seem foreign to developers more familiar with relational databases. This presentation will demystify the basic concepts behind CouchDB and give web developers a practical guide to getting started with CouchDB. We'll discuss how CouchDB relates to other SQL alternatives and what makes CouchDB unique.

Bradley Holt is a web developer, entrepreneur, community facilitator, and an advocate of free/open source software, open standards, and open content (e.g. Creative Commons). He has ten years of experience with PHP and MySQL and is a Zend Certified Engineer in Zend Framework (ZCE-ZF) with three years of experience building Zend Framework applications. He is a contributor of source code and bug reports to Zend Framework and an active member of the PHP community having attended ZendCon '08, '09, and TEK-X. He is the co-founder and organizer of the Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group and is involved with helping to organize other technology community events such as Vermont Code Camp. He is the author of the upcoming book, Writing and Querying MapReduce Views in CouchDB (O'Reilly) and is currently writing a second book on scaling CouchDB.