[tgtweak]

In general the fewer technologies you need to bring into the mix the less failure domains you need to consider. Let's also add that having an option to provide this natively allows for safe/sane defaults that prevent someone from botching a reverse proxy authentication setup which is by no means trivial to your application developer.

I can't see someone making a meaningful document level ACL outside of the db without some serious effort, nor would I consider home-baked external authentication for replication simple for the same crowd.

A side note I don't think it's good practice to expose your db to the internet, but if you look at Mongo's Atlas this doesn't seem to be as big of an issue as it may have been in the past.

[karmelapple]

We moved to CouchDB because we didn’t want to reinvent syncing. We wanted a tech that could handle the online and offline case well, and CouchDB and some supporting libraries (PouchDB, some native mobile OS libraries) helped with this.

Syncing was a solved problem in the CouchDB world, so we moved to CouchDB.

Access controls also seem like they should be a “solved problem,” something we can adopt that works well with CouchDB.

Is there some plan for a standard ACL approach for CouchDB users? If we need to put it into some app in front of the database, that eliminates the “solved” nature of sync... or at least introduces added complexities like a reverse proxy.

I really hope CouchDB could bring in some ACL management into the ecosystem as a standard, drop-in sort of approach, and not something that requires custom development for every single app that wants to use CouchDB / Cloudant.

[lukevp]

That RFC/PR adds ACLs at the document level to CouchDB, but it has been open for a year now. I hope they merge it as well. Until that PR the party line has always been to do ACL outside the DB like you would with any other DB, which really doesn’t make much sense to me.

[tgtweak]

Have a look at the ($3000/core) enterprise version of Microsoft SQL server and check the field and row level permissions with full inherited RBAC... It's a feature that has some need in the entreprise world. Ignoring these features because you can do it in the application is a bit of a sabotage... take the logic far enough and you'll eventually get to the conclusion that maybe you should build your own DB too.