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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html http://labs.google.com/papers/mapredu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html CouchDB uses the map/reduce query model which achieves its scalability by being intrinsically parallelizable. It aims to provide the foundation for databases that are scalable from the beginning, or at least offer a straighforward path to scalability. Judging by all the "How we scaled MySQL with mad hacks at [some growing startup]" articles that appear here, I would say there is a serious need for CouchDB. If your company starts growing as fast as Twitter and you don't have a team of brilliant ninja developers to build you a custom messaging server from scratch, you'll see the need for it too.

silentbicycle 18y ago
It's too bad people think MySQL is representative of all relational databases. I guess "mad hacks" make for better press / blog buzz than "we used postgres/oracle/etc. and it wasn't a big deal". (Some people love all-nighters, too.) Then again, the last thing I read about MySQL had somebody complaining how slow it was, but they hadn't ever indexed their tables. MySQL may not be the issue. I would love to hear about couchbd from someone who also understands relational databases. Under what circumstances would it be useful, besides hypothetical scaling? I don't need a better big RDBMS, but I wouldn't want to miss another incredibly useful "small" database tool like sqlite.