Dear Diary: My First Day as a Couchbase Document
The existential musings of a JSON object in a NoSQL world.
Day 1. I was born today. A Django ORM created me with an UPSERT statement. I don't know what UPSERT means, but it sounds aggressive. I have fields now: a name, a style, and something called an ABV. I feel complete.
Day 3. A Sync Gateway came by and gave me something called "_sync metadata." It's like a passport. Apparently I can travel now. I'm nervous but excited.
Day 5. I was replicated to an iPhone. There's a smaller version of me living inside something called "Couchbase Lite." We're the same but different. It's like having a twin you've never met. He lives in a SQLite file. I live in a bucket. We don't talk about the differences.
Day 7. Someone rated me 3 stars. THREE. I'm a perfectly good IPA with a balanced hop profile and a crisp finish. Three stars. The rating document now lives next to me in the collection. I can see it. It mocks me.
Day 10. Good news: my avg_rating went up to 4.2. Bad news: a management command called recompute_ratings runs every 5 minutes and I never know if the news will be good or bad. It's like a performance review that never ends.
Day 14. I was queried today with a N1QL SELECT that had 7 JOINs. I felt violated but also important. Nobody writes a 7-JOIN query for a document they don't care about.
Day 30. I've been indexed, queried, synced, rated, updated, and replicated across three continents. And you know what? I wouldn't trade it for a row in a PostgreSQL table. Those poor rows, stuck in their rigid schemas, never knowing the freedom of a JSON field that can be literally anything. Today I added a field called "vibes" just because I can. Try that in a relational database.