Need clarification on revisions

Hello, we are considering using Couchbase Lite for our Android and iOS app. We do not have any need for replication. Even if we do in future it will be for only certain documents.

From what I read in the documents deletes and updates create new revisions. My concern is that this will gradually grow the database in size. Is it possible to do in place updates and physical deletes like a normal database? As I have already said we have no need for revisions since we do not plan on doing any syncs. Thank you.

To answer my own question, according to this page we will have to manually call compact() to delete old revisions. Also it warns about performance problems and database being locked out during compaction. Sadly this is not a good situation for us. Syncing use case does not apply to us and it will be great if we could disable syncing and revisioning for a database entirely.

The compact method removes all the soft deletes (also called tombstone revisions) from the database. There is a purge method on the document API to remove that soft delete only. So you could also called purge straight after calling delete. But as far as I know, there’s no way to disable the revision based system, which is very important to keep MVCC support.

James