Yesterday, I went to Augsburg in order to attend the colloquium Volker had previously announced. Volker gave a nice introductory talk on CouchDB and GeoCouch, where he first highlighted some CouchDB features (e.g. MVCC, schema-less JSON data format), and then gave a nice introduction to GeoCouch.

The talk was more geared towards geographers rather than computer scientists, but unfortunately there were mostly computer scientists, but no geographers. The geographers that had previously shown interest in the talk cancelled the appointment on short notice due to another appointment.

Volker explained the motivation behind trying to create yet another solution for geospatial search. One reason for doing so is that CouchDB, unlike other database systems, has a schema-free data format, and therefore does not impose any unnecessary constraints in this regard. Another reason is that some of its features allow for perfect usage scenarios with mobile devices running GeoCouch: it runs with a low memory footprint, and, due to local storage and incremental replication of data, applications can work in spite of temporal network unavailability.

Finally, Volker gave some overview of GeoCouch's current state and talked a bit about its future direction.

After the talk and the following discussion, we were four people joining for the meetup: Volker, Tom, Ben, and me. We had drinks and pizza (generously sponsored by couch.io), while discussing application scenarios for CouchDB, GeoCouch, and other NoSQL databases, as well as related practical tradeoffs.

Thank you, couch.io, for sponsoring the meetup!