On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 01:56:49PM -0700, Chris Anderson wrote: > The reason why CouchDB can't do the sorting by value inside itself is > that on a multi node cluster, an individual couch can't know the > global ordering. We have a commitment to ensuring that CouchDB's API > remains invariant regardless of the size of the underlying cluster. > > So you basically have to copy the cluster-wide reduce values to an > intermediate storage mechanism (which itself can be a cluster) before > you can sort them by value.
Not sure I understand. If this is a sharded cluster, then each node could sort its own subset of results; then it's very simple and efficient to merge the already-sorted results together.
