CouchDB is really fun. The rules are very tight, but consistent, and it quickly appears to be a shotgun to cause a lot of damage with. Especially with good with

CouchDB is really fun. The rules are very tight, but consistent, and it quickly appears to be a shotgun to cause a lot of damage with. Especially with good with Javascript on the client side. There is a native Javascript driver and the protocol is RESTful (HTTP GET, PUT, DELETE). Compare the the closest NoSQL alternative, MongoDB. I say close because they are both document stores (fancy key/value) with indexing and map/reduce. MongoDB is very lean and blazing fast. But there isn't anything close to an HTTP layer in Mongo. It speaks in a binary JSON protocol. The format, commands, and driver, while well done, are a whole new set of rules to learn. Plus a Ruby middleware to talk HTTP. My conclusions are from writing a simple app with both backends. Punchline: After all this experimentation I realize I need a relational DB for my project.