[sho]

Oh yeah I know. But RDBMSs tend to be much faster at ad hoc queries.

I don't know what's going on with your Oracle install but even taking the small example of 1k rows, an unindexed ad hoc query in MySQL will return pretty quickly, well under a second on a decent machine/disk. That might be fine for, say, occasional use of a "reports" web page - and you don't need to then store and update an index. The same query on CouchDB will be at least 10 times slower, possibly making the page unusably slow, and if you want it to be usable you need to store the index - no choice.

But yeah, just "moving the pain around" is absolutely right. Ain't no silver bullets.