[erikpukinskis]

The only reason I can think of is not wanting to deal with migrations when you are changing schemas all the time. As long as you can keep all of the previous schemas in your head and account for that in your code, you don't have to migrate anything.

It's not really a very nice way to go long term, but can be convenient when prototyping.

I think CouchDB had some real potential, but Mongo is like Couch without the interesting parts. Couch was like indexes on crack. You can make an index that does arbitrary transforms. Sad part was, it didn't have any smarts to pre-cache those "views" in an intelligent way, which to me would be the whole point of that endeavor. I think something like it will come back eventually, but it's still a very research-y idea.

[HodGreeley]

Biased opinion, but Couchbase is like CouchDB on crack. So, by extension... (Disclaimer: I work for Couchbase.)

[erikpukinskis]

Huh. I was starting to prototype some stuff with CouchDB when the transition was happening and when I looked at CouchBase it seemed like something important was being abandoned but now I can't recall what I thought that was. I'll look at it again.

As an aside, what I really wanted from CouchDB was that I could create a view and as I inserted new documents into the DB, CouchDB would automatically generate the new view documents so when I query the view, everything is already precached.

At the time I needed to implement a fire hose listener that would would sip inserts and decide which views with which parameters needed to get called, and then just hit them with REST to do the precaching. It seemed cumbersome, but it sort of made sense why it would be hard for the DB to know what queries on the view were implicated by a new document.

Has CouchBase improved the story there at all? To me that was always the killer promise of CouchDB... Storing documents in a format that made sense at creation time and having arbitrarily complex views on that data... without a cache hiccup. But that "without a cache hiccup" never seemed to quite materialize as a first class feature.