Some useful talking points for discussing CouchDB.
- CouchDB is not a relational database management system (RDBMS). CouchDB != SQL
- Updating documents creates new documents. There are no partial updates or stored diffs.
Views are crucial to CouchDB. Similar in nature to indexes in a traditional RDBMS but lazily evaluated following a MapReduce paradigm. Views let you sort and filter data.
- Reduce is tricky, yet powerful.
- Complex key collation is important, yet can also be tricky.
Replication can create conflicts. This is unavoidable. System design should explicitly account for possible conflicts as they will happen.
The internal revisioning system is only for conflict detection and optimistic locking (Multi-Version Concurrency Control MVCC).
The internal revisioning system is not usable as a revision control system.