Hi Everyone, Traditionally every design doc has a view signature (a md5 checksum), which is made up of the views defined in it along with the options and query language.
As Paul mentions on the map index RFC [1], the reason that indexes were grouped together was to save space on the id tree index and to guarantee that specific indexes are always up to date at the same time. Currently it is also more efficient to service multiple map/reduce functions at once when sending docs to the javascript query engine. With the move to FoundationDB, we don’t get the added space saving of grouping view indexes together for the id tree index. And to guarantee that all the views in a design doc are updated to the same point, we would have to update multiple views in the transaction which will lead to larger transactions and the possibility of exceeding the 10 MB transaction limit. Because of that, I would like to separate each index in a design document so that it has its own unique signature and that each index will be built on its own. That way only a specific index’s key/values will be updated in a transaction. It also would mean that when a design doc is updated with new views or some of the views are changed, the unchanged views won’t need to be rebuilt as their view signatures would remain the same. We could look at adding a view group, which contains a collection of views - most likely the views in one design document would be a view group. So instead of updating one view in the background job queue, all the indexes in a view group would be built by that job. But they would not be updated in the same transaction, however the job would only be considered complete once all the views in a view group were updated. Where I’m not 100% if this would work is around the javascript query engine. This change would mean that only one function would be processed at a time, so it could be a lot more inefficient. Ideally it would be great to update how the javscript query engine works so it can handle this case better. The usage of view signatures is pretty new to me, so I would appreciate feedback from people that know more about the history of view signatures and design docs, along with people that use views and rely on indexes in a design doc all being updated at once. Cheers Garren [1] https://github.com/apache/couchdb-documentation/pull/410#pullrequestreview-236827606
