Have you ever dreamt about a powerful database that you can access easily, without using the SQL language? That what Apache CouchDB is all about. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to get started with this document-riented database and how you can use it with PHP.

They briefly cover what CouchDB (and NoSQL databases) are and how their records are stored - document based rather than row/column based like standard RDBMS. They use the PHPillow library to connect to their database and include the code to do an insert and pull that same data back out.

The wrapper is called PHPillow, lays on top of the Couch and offers even more comfort laying anything into the database. :) It has complete API documentation, currently a test coverage of >95%, tutorials and practical examples included. Even I would call it alpha - as CouchDB is still alpha at the current state - you can expect it stay quite stable API wise, as I rely heavily on it in other projects and therefore won't break too much.

You can check out the latest version of this wrapper from its subversion site and get more information about CouchDB on its website and wiki.