July 8, 2025, 4 p.m.

How to Sync Anything, Stories from Local-First + Apache™ CouchDB User Survey Results

Promising growth of the CouchDB community, new Neighbourhoodie Case Studies and “How to Sync Anything” series.

Neighbourhoodie’s Newsletter

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Welcome to the Neighbourhoodie Newsletter

It’s been a short while since we greeted you from your inbox, which means there are lots of updates ahead.

We’re most excited about what the CouchDB User Survey results revealed, especially when combined with sentiments of CouchDB we’ve been hearing at events. If you use it, you already know about its unparalleled functionality. Now these features have piqued the interest of the Local-First community too, which has made our team enthusiastic about seeing CouchDB in the hands of a whole new generation of developers.

With all that’s going on, it’s an excellent time to start using — or contributing to — CouchDB. Read on for news and inspo.

CouchDB Updates

Annual Apache CouchDB™ User Survey Results Are Out!

If you haven’t taken a look yet, you can learn what others are using in their stack and what their CouchDB boasts are, like this one:

“4500 databases, 96 TB of data, 4 500 000 000 documents”

The feature requests are interesting too, and this time around we went ahead and marked requests that have already found their way onto the roadmap. Read a brief overview on the CouchDB blog, and take a look at all the results:

📘 2024 Apache CouchDB User Survey Results Executive Summary

📊 Raw results in a read-only Google Sheet

We won’t go into analysis in this newsletter, but we did want to spotlight a Neighbourhoodie solution that aligns with something people miss once they start using CouchDB, and that’s SQL-like queries:

Want to use SQL queries with your CouchDB?

Structured Query Server (SQS) helps you get data out of your CouchDB in the language you already know — SQL.

Find out more

There were also a lot of great calls for documentation contributions and for blog content. If you’ve ever wanted to volunteer your efforts to the CouchDB project but didn’t know how to break the ice, give writing a try. Because Case Studies were so frequently mentioned, we’ve put together something to help:

📝 CouchDB Case Study Submission Form

You can use this to share your CouchDB story and help future CouchDB devs decide if it’s the database for them. Take a look at the first submission by Chirag Moradiya of Hisab — thank you, Chirag!

CouchDB 3.5.0

Here are some highlights from the CouchDB team’s May release:

  • Parallel Preads are here! A P-Read is a location-specific read operation. CouchDB has used them forever, but now it can do these in parallel on the same file for a 10-40% concurrency throughout boost. It’s so cool we’ve added a P-Read feature deep-dive to our blog to explain how it works and share new benchmarks.
  • xxHash is now enabled by default for faster integrity checks. The feature was added in 3.4.2, but wasn’t enabled by default because it made rolling back non-trivial. In case you are on 3.3.x or lower, or want to know more about how it works, take a look at our recommendations for upgrading. Otherwise, enjoy a more efficient checksum algorithm.
  • A conflict finder plugin has been added to the scanner module. In 3.4.2 the CouchDB team introduced QuickJS to replace SpiderMonkey as CouchDB’s JS engine, and included a scanner plugin to make the switch easier. The newly added functionality makes this little plugin useful for more than just migrating.

For a comprehensive list of changes, take a look at the official release docs.

Neighbourhoodie Updates

Case Studies

Last year Neighbourhoodie turned 10 years old! That’s just old enough for our task of sharing more of our work to be a little overdue. We’ve since given a fresh coat of paint and some additions to our Case Studies page.

iDAI.field

The German Archeological Institute, or DAI, is a world leader in research that equips field archaeologists from global organisations to access, record and save data at excavation sites — no matter how remote — with the iDAI.field app. Goodbye dusty stacks of paper, hello interoperable data!

We spoke with Lisa Steinmann, head of Archaeoinformatics at DAI, to learn how her team negotiated the flexible data structures that foster centralisation and collaboration and what data needs look like from the site office.

Find out what we discovered during refactoring and how we enhanced accessibility of the iDAI.field app in the full interview.

How to Sync Anything

You may not be calling it one, but merged departments, added locations and new integrations often lead to a replication problem: a need to have data in both a source and a target data store.

If this sounds familiar, or if you can’t quite describe what distinguishes true replication from its ad-hoc counterpart, this 4-part series is for you.

Neighbourhoodie’s James Coglan introduces us to naive solutions and their limitations in part 1, How to Sync Anything. For the remainder, Jan Lehnardt takes over and in the second installment, How to Sync Anything: Building a Sync Engine from Scratch — Part 1, examines the motivations and ingredients for replication. The third instalment takes a look at how to determine what to replicate, and the fourth and final instalment covers versioning in your very own sync engine.

Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel

We’re very grateful to join events and participate in communities that are so good at documenting and sharing what we get up to. Now it’s our turn to continue sharing CouchDB knowledge and become a more regular fixture on the world’s second most-loved website.

🍿 Visit the Neighbourhoodie YouTube Channel

Take a look and subscribe for a focus on CouchDB, PouchDB and Offline-First tutorials, walkthroughs and how-tos.

More From the Blog

🆕 RSS Feed

Tutorials are among the most read articles from our blog, and the Pouchnotes demo app was no exception. Alex Feyerke also used this to present the PouchDB workshop at this latest edition of the Local-First conference, and we’ve never seen so many people leave social media feeds to join the demo. If you want to get a feel for the state of Offline-First in 2025, this is the one.

Another strong theme to emerge from the user survey is that readers appreciate concept coverage and feature spotlights. We already do this on the Neighbourhoodie Blog, so take a look at our two latest feature spots:

  • Understanding Database Partitioning in CouchDB: there are significant performance gains to be achieved with partitioning, depending on your use case. This article covers what it is and how to leverage it.
  • Using Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) in CouchDB: few things are infallible, people included. That’s why CouchDB protects your data and your users, including with 2FA. We cover how it works and walk you through setting it up on your CouchDB.

Local-First 2025 in Berlin

Local-First Conf had its second edition in Berlin and we, of course, were there! It was very inspiring to connect with so many people who are passionate about the problems and solutions we are too.

On the first day, Alex Feyerke from our team presented a PouchDB workshop; watch the full recording here.

Jan Lehnardt from our team kicked off the second day of the conference with a field report capturing 15 years of local-first projects:

15 Years of Local First: A Best-Of Report From The Field by Jan Lehnardt

You can read about what we got up to and saw, and don’t miss the complete set of conference talks on YouTube.

Want to Get More Involved?

Many CouchDB users expressed a desire to contribute more to the project. We welcome volunteers from any background, and there are many ways in which you can be involved.

  • The user survey has great ideas for documentation contributions to help peer devs.
  • Share your case study to help both readers and search engines find CouchDB.
  • Volunteer your JavaScript skills to enhance Fauxton.

These are just a few examples. If you are knowledgeable in any one of these fields: Erlang, Elixir, writing documentation, client-side JavaScript, Docker, or continuous integration with Jenkins on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD or Windows, CouchDB would love to count on your help.

That’s it for now!

We’re grateful you joined us for another round of news and updates. Before you head back into your inbox, we’re wishing you a cool summer or a bearable winter, wherever you find yourself. Until the next edition 👋


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