as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

I've been working with CouchDB as a database in which applications can store their data; there's an increasing trend recently for applications to start using databases to store their data rather than flat files, and I personally think it's a jolly good trend. There's been rumours for years about the idea of a database-backed filesystem, where instead of pathnames you use queries and so on; that's never happened (and I'm not convinced it will ever happen), but individual apps can get most of the benefits of that by using a database to store their data. I like CouchDB for this because it has a number of advantages over simple databases like SQLite; for example, CouchDB does replication, meaning that I can get all my data on all my machines. This is a genuinely lovely property. It's been really interesting talking to the Tomboy team about how this sort of procedure ties in with what they're doing; we've been working on their Snowy server and talking about its API and how it should work, too. Cool times ahead for this stuff. I'm really excited!