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Message-ID: <e282921e0810271336mbb9a625iccf6be9de2dbda67@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:36:54 -0700
From: "Chris Anderson" <jchris@apache.org>
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To: couchdb-user@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Efficient view design question
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On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Ben Nevile <ben@mainsocial.com> wrote:
> Thanks Jason.  One further clarification, re "If you set the *update* option
> to*false*, CouchDB will not perform any refreshing on the view that may be
> necessary."
> Does this mean that if I only call the view with update=false, the view
> index will never be updated?
>
> Ben

The update=false behavior is complicated by some implementation
details. Oh, and the feature is currently not available in trunk, but
is under active development.

The upshot is that update=false will be useful for reducing latency in
queries against a database that has a lot of writes going into it.
However, it's not a guarantee that the no updating will be triggered,
nor does it guarantee that results will be returned immediately. For
that reason, the name might be misleading, but let's wait til the
implementation is done to reconsider the name.

Implementation details: update=false queries the latest available
version of a completed view index. This means that if the view has not
been built yet, there will not be an available completed index, and
the index will be built before running the query. Also, in the case of
a freshly booted server, there may not be a pointer to the last
completed index, so we end up running an update then as well. For
various reasons, partially completed indexes are not viable for
queries.

There are a lot of people who'd like a progress-bar on view
computation. It is possible that we'll make available something like
update=status, which could tell users roughly how many docs have been
mapped, vs how many docs there are total, which would give an
approximate measure of progress.

Chris


-- 
Chris Anderson
http://jchris.mfdz.com