I talked about difficult naming decisions, and this one was certainly one of the more lively ones.

We bounced between zombies, orphans and ghosts, with a bunch of crazy stuff going in between. At one point it was suggested we’ll just make up a word, but my suggestion to use Welchet was sadly declined by all, including a rather rude comment by the author of this blog about what kind of jokes are appropriate for the workplace.

After we settled the discussion on ghosts, there was another discussion about whatever we should use Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. I tell you, when we aren’t building distributed databases, the office is a hotbed for nerd references.

And then an idea cam along. Which I really liked, so we talked about this in the morning and I’m showing screenshots at a blog post a bit before midnight. The feature is called the revision bin.

In the UI, you can see it as one of the top level elements.

In essence, this is a recycle bin for revisions. RavenDB can be configured to keep revisions of documents as they change, and even keep track of them after they were deleted. However, that presented a problem. If you deleted a document that had revisions, how would you tell that it was there in the first place? Just knowing the document id and looking for that wouldn’t work very well. So we created the revisions bin, whose content looks like this:

And from there you can go to:

For that matter, if we recreate this document again, you’ll be able to see its entire history, including across deletes.

Now admittedly this is a nice looking UI, and the skull on the menu is a nice touch, if a bit morbid. However, why make such a noise about such a feature?

The answer is that the revisions bin isn’t that important, but keeping track of deletes of documents using revisions is quite important, since it allow subscriptions and ETL to handle them in a clean and easy to grok manner. And in order to actually explain that, we needed to be able to show the users what we are talking about.