Managing dynamic, high-capacity systems can be difficult and expensive using databases like MySQL or SQL Server. Until now, web developers have had to principally rely on SQL-based data storage and management. Apache CouchDB, an open source document-oriented database solution, offers a new approach to storing and querying large quantities of data that relies far less on a rigid organizational schema and allows you to store documents and other data objects intact.

In CouchDB you create simple schema-less documents and perform operations against the data via an implementation of the MapReduce algorithm. As a result, CouchDB-based data stores are flexible, highly fault-tolerant, and massively scalable. Although CouchDB itself is written in Erlang, its default query language is JavaScript, which means that it's a great choice for most web developers.

CouchDB in Action is a guide for developers building high-volume data-driven applications for the web. Designed for web developers familiar with SQL-based database technology, the book presents a series of pragmatic examples that explore CouchDB's features from installation to deployment. In it, you'll master the techniques you need to manipulate large data sets effectively.

Through a series of examples and use cases, you'll develop your understanding by performing examples such as querying views, pagination, sorting, filtering, and data manipulation not easily performed in a traditional SQL paradigm. Along the way, you'll learn how CouchDB leverages the MapReduce-based power that Google and Hadoop are using today. As well, you'll learn integration patterns for using CouchDB with other platforms.