Cloudant is a schemaless document database that provides high performance, availability, and scalability. These features are not necessarily incompatible with a standards-compliant query language like SQL-92. The following sections show various schemes that the adapter offers to bridge the gap with relational SQL and a document database.

The adapter models the schemaless Cloudant objects into relational tables and translates SQL queries into Cloudant queries to get the requested data. See Query Mapping for more details on how various Cloudant operations are represented as SQL.

The Automatic Schema Discovery scheme automatically finds the data types in a Cloudant object by scanning a configured number of rows of the object. You can use RowScanDepth, FlattenArrays, and FlattenObjects to control the relational representation of the collections in Cloudant.

The schema of the table is necessary to report metadata, but you can write Free-Form Queries not tied to the schema to select, insert, update, or delete data from columns that do not exist in the schema.

The adapter supports listing Cloudant views and retrieving data from them. This is controlled by the ListViews property which is set to false by default. Set this property to true for Cloudant views to be displayed when listing tables.