Chris Norton

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As part of a larger modification I have been working on I decided to use straight database queries from inside Magento rather than try and find out (and spend time debugging) what the proper “Magento way” to achieve the same thing was. After a bit of investigation I came up with what I think will be most generally useful and should work from almost anywhere in a Magento system.

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CouchDB is a (relatively) new database option for development that focuses on documents, rather than generic relational systems like most databases do. I think the concept is appealing and support for things like automatic versioning and distributed processing and storage could mean a lot fewer headaches that trying to get a custom system going yourself. Also interesting is the JSON storage format, which would make this ideal to use in many asynchronous web applications as the data returned can be used straight away on the browser.

I haven’t had any cause to use this system yet but I’ll be sure to write a review when I do. Anyone else taken this for a spin?

OK, so I’ve made some comments about the Madman site in the past but lately I have been getting more and more upset by outages in the service. Right now that has really reached boiling point as I’ve been trying to get to the site for the last 7 hours. Read on for more ranting on the subject, along with some (hopefully) constructive criticism.

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Junction is a new PHP 5 object persistence layer.