CouchDBExtension - I've recently started work on a new project named CouchDBExtension which is hosted here on codeplex. In short it's a data processing extension that allows you to use Apache's CouchDB databases as a data source in SQL Server Reporting Services. For those of you who are unfamiliar with CouchDB it's a schema-free, document-oriented database system with a REST JSON API and is written in Erlang. Screenshots The project is just getting underway and I'd appreciate any help or feedback anyone has to offer.
A little bit o' Erlang - Although it's not the subject of this article I've been fooling around with CouchDB a bit lately. CouchDB is perhaps most well known for being written in Erlang, a functional language developed by Ericsson. All of the fiddling around really got me interested in actually hacking out some Erlang to evaluate any practical purpose it may have to me. I've messed around with functional languages in the past, namely F#, Caml and quite a bit of Lisp, but this was all in my spare time with no real goal in mind. In short, I am not an experienced functional programmer. I am familiar enough that if I bend my brain I can more or less get into the functional mindset although it certainly doesn't feel natural to me. Due to this...
C from erlang via linked-in driver - Erlang truly is a useful language. It's fast, full-featured and elegant. Like all high-level languages, however, you sometimes need to access legacy or system code written in another language like, you guessed it, C. I came accross this situation recently when porting my webcrawler to erlang. Under pressure http:request proved to be unreliable when used in a multi-threaded scenario. The solution I chose was to bridge erlang with libcurl by way of an erlang "linked-in driver". While I only used it for retrieving web page content into memory I figure I'll be able to wrap all of libcurl in the future. C I'll start out with some C code that will function as the bridge between erlang and libcurl. This is the code that qualifies as a "linked-in" driver. Like all...
