Taking a look at issue #358 [1] I started thinking about random selections of CouchDB views again. Could we implement a _list function as described in [2] which can randomly spit out K articles? The page says that CouchDB generates etags for these calls but doesn't seem to suggest anywhere that they are cached by CouchDB itself, meaning that if we felt like living dangerously we could make the calls non-idempotent.
I might be overlooking some nasty negative effects this has on our performance and our bucket generation. I know there's been some refactoring around this since I last fully understood the couch silo. As a (slightly tangential) note: CouchDB tosses back etags for lots of things. Do we have a cache sitting between melk.model and the couch instance? Seems like that might be a nice thing to have. If we do, and we "live dangerously" (as described above), we'd have to configure it to ignore the _list URIs. -Randall [1] http://oss.openplans.org/melkjug/ticket/358 [2] http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Formatting_with_Show_and_List
