Background
- I have a CouchDB cluster running a few databases.
- One of these has docs with a few hundred pieces of data in a somewhat complex structure. (a 'human' for example with height, weight, eye color, hair color, clothing, gps position, and a few hundred other things)
- I want to look for intersections between a couple of data points, ie BLUE eyes and BLACK hair.
- I have hundreds factorial possible combinations I could search for. I do these searches fairly rarely.
- I write to this database quite a lot.
What I want to Do
use a temporary view to pass in a map/reduce for these interesction lookups (queries) when they occure.
Why not?
The docs tell me it's a terrible idea.
The Question
Why is it a terrible idea? Is it really a terrible idea?
Bonus Points
If it is a terrible idea what's a good idea? A view for every combination is silly many views, and loading the whole pile of data into another program for this feels overkill (I'm noticing lucene has some tools for this and I could cook up a Node one if I had to). I could move to a tool like that if I had to, I just don't yet understand why.
Temporary views are only intended for development use, as they are forced to rebuild the entire view index each time they are invoked, and their results are not saved like a typical view. This will have a bigger penalty the more documents in your database, and it will bite you quickly if you try to use it as a dynamic query system. (source v1.6.1 documentation) As a matter of fact, temporary views are dropped entirely from v2. (source v2.0.0 upgrade notes)
I'm not sure which version of CouchDB you are running, but if you are using v1 and you want to do a highly dynamic query here, you may be much better served incorporating some sort of fulltext indexer, such as apache lucene or elasticsearch. They will add lots of flexibility to your searching, in addition to supporting multiple parameters simultaneously.
If you are using CouchDB v2, you can also consider using the new Mango Query Server which adds mongodb-style syntax for querying documents. With this feature, you can definitely include multiple parameters and do more dynamic searching.