The discussions around CouchDB make me laugh. CouchDB is supposed to be a document-oriented database, but there are no keys (primary, foreign, whatever) since it’s not an RDBMS. Even some clever people can’t think of the solution to a very simple problem (a weblog application), as you can see here.
CouchDB was created to make life simpler, but I guess it’s so simple, that you can’t solve basic problems with it. Perhaps the inventors can, but I can’t see ANY use for such a database. Put all documents together, and in the process give them a unique ID (so they have a key, yes). But you know how a mailbox with 10000 e-mails feels like? Right. You’ve got to organize that. Therefore CouchDB has views.
Sounds to me like a bunch of guys that couldn’t get their precious Erlang to work on {fill in your preferred RDBMS} and wrote something that has no rules, no indexes and leave it all up to the user/developer. Right. Basically they are giving us a filesystem that needs to be organized in views…erm…I mean folders. We all know how that’s gonna end up.
What a laugh. Let someone please give me a real-life situation where CouchDB is going to save your ass. Not some buzzing like “it scales” (for what?), “it’s functional” (for what??) or “you don’t need to learn SQL” (so what?). If I can see a solution for a real-life problem (start with the simple one, the weblog) without reaching for old-school stuff like relations or objects, then perhaps I’m interested. I won’t hold my breath.