With the rise of the NoSQL movement, a whole new crop of different ways to store data suddenly became available to the Java developer. Unfortunately,what didn't come with them was an owner's manual. CouchDB, for example, was the first of the NoSQL databases to be named as such, and offers features not found in the traditional RDBMS: A distributed, robust, incremental replication document-oriented database server with bi-directional conflict detection and management, accessible via a RESTful JSON API, stored ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space, that is both query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine that uses JavaScript as a query language. (With a list of buzzwords like that, what's not to love?)

In this session, we'll look at CouchDB, how to set it up, store data to it, retrieve data from it, and in general figure out where it fits within your next project.