Every Ubuntu Karmic user will have an address book stored in CouchDB

Every Ubuntu Karmic user will have an address book stored in CouchDB(mail-archives.apache.org)

45 points by paulcarey 16 years ago | 14 comments

felixc 16 years ago |

Though the comments here so far seem positive, there has also been a lot of negative backlash, primarily out of privacy concerns.

Elliot Murphy posted a comment on LWN clarifying his message (comment here: http://lwn.net/Articles/356947/ attached to parent http://lwn.net/Articles/356911/). The most relevant part is this: "It seems I was overenthusiastic when sending that email to the couchdb dev list, and left out an important word: 'can' be replicated :)"

In other words, this is an optional service that you can choose to use -- no default install is going to send your info to Canonical.

chanux 16 years ago | |

abook with dropbox/ubuntuone for the geek who is concerned about privacy.

davidw 16 years ago |

Seems like an awful lot of server just for an address book.

gord 16 years ago | |

clearly Ubuntu think CouchDB will be useful in other areas... and this is a trial run.

Id stick my neck out to say that something like CouchDB will become the de-facto standard for almost all data. Data that isn't {securely} on the web is in effect data that doesn't exist, while more data than not is naturally in a graph or tree-like form.

Mix in offline mode, JavaScript on client and server and you have a really nice development stack to make apps with.

I can imagine a generation of teenagers developing web apps [they'll think there is no other kind of app] using map / reduce idioms to get to their data, SQL a thing of the past.

dualogy 16 years ago | | |

Would be nice but my feeling is that the simplicity of SQL CRUD statements could be grokked by way more teenagers in the "past" than will be able to grasp map-reduce in the "future".

Myself I'm also into document DBs and graph DBs, a lot. But for the kind of rapid prototyping that got most of us going as teenagers in the first place, I'd argue table based data with the simplest incarnations of INSERT UPDATE DELETE SELECT WHERE haven't been beaten yet by those no-SQL DBs.

tmountain 16 years ago |

Does this also mean Erlang will ship with Ubuntu? That'd be a nice bonus.

jurjenh 16 years ago | |

Yes, been installed on my laptop for a good coupla months now... Now I only have to http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ for great good!

futuremint 16 years ago |

The awesome part about it is that your database can be very easily replicated "to the cloud" for backup/sharing purposes.

This is an attractive feature of CouchDB that I'm considering for a web application too.

tlrobinson 16 years ago | |

Is it possible to replicate a users' local database into a shared "cloud" database (many-to-one) or does the "cloud" have to have one database per user (one-to-one)

mey 16 years ago | | |

CouchDB's current built in replication doesn't have the concept of sharing partial data yet. It currently push/pulls everything in a single Database. Conversely it's also a trivial thing to create a new database, so one database per user would certainly be possible. Also as the project develops that is functionality that is intended to be there.

DanielStraight 16 years ago |

This sounds like it has some cool potential. Also, I'm in love with CouchDB. So... awesome!

chanux 16 years ago |

But I thought KDE guys would be the first to go with CouchDB.

swannodette 16 years ago |

Just mentioned this myself here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881488

gord 16 years ago | |

HN/PG feature request - merge 'really the same' threads feature?

I guess a link works well enough.