If you’re trying to wean yourself away from SQL for everything database related, NoSQL based options like CouchDB are fantastic, but require some rewiring of the brain.

Searching in these databases, without SQL, was a learning curve.

I’m interacting with CouchDB using Python, and while you can create views to help find data, sometimes I knew one of the keys in the document and the value, I wanted to find all documents matching that.

In SQL world I’d do a SELECT WHERE and find the data I wanted, but in CouchDB it’s a bit harder to find.

Using the db.find() function with the {selector} as an input you can filter for all records that have the key value pair you’re looking for.

for doc in db.find({'selector': {'keyyouwanttofind': 'valueofkeyyouwanttofind'}}):
     print(doc)