Can I create multiple collections per database?

Question

Switching from mongo to pouchdb (with Cloudant), i like the \"one database per user\" concept, but is there a way to create multiple collections/tables per database ?

Ex

Answer 1

I may not fully understand what you need here but in general you can achieve what you describe in 3 different ways in CouchDB/Cloudant/PouchDB.

1. Single document per person (Peter, John). Sure - if the collections are not enormous and more importantly if they are not updated by different users concurrently (or worse in different database instances) leading to conflicts then, in JSON just an element for each collection, holding an array and you can manipulate everything with just one document. Makes access a breeze.
2. Single document per collection (Peter History, Peter Settings ect). Similar constraints, but you could create a document to hold each of these collections. Provided they will not be concurrently modified often, you would then have a document for Peter's History, and another for Peter's Settings.
3. Single document per item. This is the finest grain approach - lots of small simple documents each containing one element (say a single History entry for Peter). The code gets slightly simpler because removing items becomes a delete and many clients can update items simultaneously, but now you depend on Views to bring all the items into a list. A view with keys [person, listName, item] for example would let you access what you want.

Generally your data schema decisions come down to concurrency. You mention PouchDB so it may be that you have a single threaded client and option 1 is nice and easy?