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Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:37:30 -0500
Message-ID: <e2111bbb0902101437p1390367bn12189aa9032f083@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: A permanent view for user-entered query with complex boolean
	expressions?
From: Paul Davis <paul.joseph.davis@gmail.com>
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
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On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Barry Wark <barrywark@gmail.com> wrote:
> Paul,
>
> Thanks for the very interesting response. CouchDB is looking like a
> huge win for us in the long run. A couple of quick follow ups inline
> below...
>

[snip]

>> Now that we know the relative number of docids we can start searching
>> for the result set by applying each boolean clause using set math. We
>> just apply from the smallest number of docids to the largest to try
>> and make sure we keep resource usage to a minimum.
>
> This seems like a very common pattern. Is there any chance of getting
> it implemented in CouchDB?
>

There's definitely a chance. No idea how soon or in what exact nature
the feature would end up looking like but I've found the CouchDB
community very accepting of patches for new features. I'm pretty
interested in such a feature myself and I'll be posting a summary
email of my thoughts shortly for discussion on what people would find
most beneficial as well as finding if there are any flaws in my logic
etc.

>>
>> At the moment, that's the pure CouchDB way. In real life for your
>> query interface I'd most likely write a small slave process that uses
>> the _external interface. Hopefully in the next months a couple feature
>> ideas I have rattling around will coalesce into an implementation that
>> will make things like this easier from directly within CouchDB. But
>> for right now, that's all hand waving.
>
> I'm not familiar with the _external interface yet. Is there some
> documentation? Is this how the lucene index that Robert mentions
> works?
>
> User-specifiable queries like this  is going to be a critical feature
> for us, whether we go with CouchDB or not, so I'm very interested in
> keeping up with related developments. Feel free to contact me offline
> if you're interested in more specific use cases etc.
>
> Thanks again,
> Barry
>

The current _external interface documentation can be found at [1]. Its
basically just a thin wrapper around the HTTP request and response to
allow for custom code to be run behind CouchDB.

The easiest way to keep up is by following the dev list. I'd
definitely recommend it if you're interested in testing features as
they land.

[1] http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/ExternalProcesses

HTH,
Paul Davis