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ech

Ech is a project mainly written in ..., based on the View license.

Embeddable CouchDB

======================= ech - Embedded CouchDB

What and Why

ech is an Erlang library that provides a simple interface for using CouchDB as an embeddable database within your Erlang application.

It is fundamentally different from Erlang clients that interface with CouchDB over HTTP.

Here's how you'd use it:

1> {ok, Db} = ech:open("test"). 2> Doc = ech_doc:new("chi", [{name, "Chicago"}, {type, "city"}]). 3> ech:put(Db, Doc). 4> {ok, Loaded} = ech:get(Db, "chi"). 5> ech_doc:get_attrs(Loaded). [{type,"city"},{name,"Chicago"}]

You might want to work with an embedded database instead of a CouchDB over HTTP for these reasons:

  • You want a simple, scalable, performant data store that is part of your application and doesn't have to be installed and managed separately

  • You want to build your own distributed database and want to leverage CouchDB's outstanding b-tree indexing, lazy indexing, and replication support

  • The idea of unnecessarily forcing Erlang through a JSON/HTTP layer offends your sense of economy

Getting Started

Get the source for CouchDB and note its root directory, which is used as COUCH_HOME below.

Get the ech source from github.

At a console prompt:

$ cd ech $ export COUCH_HOME=

$ make

Running Tests

$ make TESTS=ech_tests test

Using ech

Refer to ECH_HOME/lib/ech/src/ech_tests.erl for examples.

You can experiment with ech from an Erlang shell by running:

$ make shell

Installing ech

We're working on this. Until something better is available, you can simply include ETCH_HOME in the ERL_LIBS environment variable when running your application. E.g.

$ ERL_LIBS= erl

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