IBM Cloudant is a distributed NoSQL database build on couchDB. It is a NoSQL JSON document data store, delivered as a managed database service (DBaaS).
Types of documents that Cloudant supports:
- data document (json and xml)
- design document. Are intended to hold the definition for all secondary and search indexes created in data documents. All design documents _id will start with “_design/” followed by the design document name.
Two attributes are required in every document:
- _id attribute is automatically generated if not specified
- _rev is always autogenerated and manage by cloudant every time you modify a document. It is used by cloudant to do the autosync between various replicas.
It is ideal for application that require:
- massive elastic scalability
- high availability
- geo-location services
- full-text search
- occasionally connected users.
When you are designing Cloudant collections, you should have in mind some good practice for that:
- as much as possible try to have single schema documents per Cloudant database. However, if you decide to have multiple schema documents in one DB make sure to add a schema-type attribute in every document.
- let Cloudant generate the _id attribute, unless you are absolutely sure it is going to be unique.
Resources:
- https://developer.ibm.com/clouddataservices/docs/cloudant/