[smoyer]

I built two products on CouchDB 1.x starting in 2010 ... version three is another amazing step forward! For my more recent projects, I've replaced CouchDB with clustered PostgreSQL using JSON columns as I really enjoy the ability to write SQL queries for against the JSON and to use the built-in full-text search capabilities. I think both CouchDB and clustered PostgreSQL are amazing tools and it's nice to be able to choose between them as needed. The best advice I've heard is to choose CouchDB when you know your queries ahead of time and the data "schema"[1] is variable and choose PostgreSQL when you know your data ahead of time and your queries are variable.

[1] In this case, a JSON document but either with a JSON-schema or marshaled/unmarshaled into a strict type.

[jimstr]

I've gotten the impression that clustered Postgres still isn't very straightforward to run. Do you mind elaborating on your ideal setup and point to some resources?

Thanks!

[smoyer]

It's not straightforward at all but it's better than it was five years ago ... you can use something more "meta" like SymmetricDS (https://www.symmetricds.org/). I haven't used it personally but a dirt simple way to get an HA, scalable PostgreSQL instance would be to use Amazon's Aurora DB.

[karmelapple]

JSON Schema has been a big benefit for our use case. Our iOS, Android, and web app all pull in a schema from one repo, which serves up that schema via Cocoapods, Gradle, or npm. We built it years ago and it’s worked smoothly ever since.