One of the interesting things about Wazoku‘s Startup Challenge app is that a lot of the functionality is created via “out of the box” CouchDB features. In fact it is often where we haven’t lent heavily on the features of our store and frameworks where we have issues.

One of the interesting things we decided to do in the app relatively late in the day was provide little encouragements to say how many more votes an entry needed to get to the next place in the ladder. As this was a late feature we didn’t really think through where this feature would sit. We had code that re-ranks entries when their vote ordering changes and so when an entry was being re-ranked it also acquired the target to beat at the same time.

With a store like CouchDB you are really aiming to keep on reading data and minimising writes. That’s via denormalisation and also about strategies to generate related and derived data when you are changing the parent data.

So this placement made sense from that point of view. It was only later that I have begun to realise that we were choosing the wrong point to read. With hindsight it is actually only necessary to calculate the target entry when someone looks at the entry. This is because the views of the entries are distributed unequally and the vote totals already exist as a CouchDB view and therefore we can do a key lookup to find all entries with more votes than the current entry when needed.

If we wanted to cache that result to avoid needless recalculation we would be better off storing the information in front-side cache like Memcached or Redis but in practice key reads in CouchDB are pretty damn fast and low load.

So we thought we were saving ourselves problems by denormalising derived data but in fact we were creating a lot more work at a point where it is uncertain that the additional data will ever be consumed.

Sometimes it can be hard to pick the right point to read!