title: bulk retrieve in CouchDB?
body: <p>I recently started to consider CouchDB to store a large list of dicts I manipulate in Python. Large in my case means about 20k elements.</p>
  
  <p>I found out that the <a href="https://pythonhosted.org/CouchDB/client.html#couchdb.client.Database.update" rel="nofollow"><code>update()</code></a> method is very fast in pushing my whole list in one HTTP call. It takes about 3 seconds, which is perfect for my case.</p>
  
  <p>I also need (in a different script) to retrieve the whole content of this database and store it in a list of dicts. This is the opposite operation to the one above. 
  Unfortunately the only way I found to do this is via</p>
  
  <pre><code># db is the database opened following a couchdb.Server() call
  mylist = list()
  for id in db:
      mylist.append(db[id])
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This takes 10 minutes as there is a call for each element of the loop.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Is there an equivalent to <code>update()</code> to bulk-retrieve the contents of a database?</li>
  <li>or should I approach the retrieving part in a different, more efficient way?</li>
  </ul>