I wouldn't say that it didn't live up to the hype. I think it just has a steeper learning curve than a lot of other NoSQL databases and is often overlooked. Mo

I wouldn't say that it didn't live up to the hype. I think it just has a steeper learning curve than a lot of other NoSQL databases and is often overlooked. MongoDB makes a lot of sense to folks already familiar with relational databases. Collections are like tables, documents are like rows, and it's easy to use document IDs to establish relations and perform queries like you would in a relational database. There are a lot of problems with using it like a RDBMS, but still a developer with zero knowledge of MongoDB can become productive with it very quickly. When learning CouchDB, the first WTF moment is when you realize there are no tables and that all the documents regardless of the type of data they contain go in the same place. Eventually you learn that you can add a type field to the documents to distinguish between them, which does feel hackish. The next WTF moment is when you want to query the data and realize you have to use map-reduce to do what would seem trivial in any other database. The early version of the admin tool definitely didn't make this easy since it required writing a JavaScript function and escaping it so that it could be stored as a single-line JSON string. It also didn't help that the map-reduce code was stored in special documents that used magical document IDs to distinguish them from other documents, which again feels hackish but makes sense eventually. That said, I am a big fan of CouchDB, and I hope that with the query language and new UI in 2.0 that CouchDB will earn the respect it deserves.