On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Bill Dueber <b...@dueber.com> wrote: > Oops. I just found a better overview than I can provide, at > http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Comparing+Mongo+DB+and+Couch+DB
I was just about to send that link. > There are lots of other players in this space, too -- see > http://nosql-database.org/ It depends on how you define "that space". There are lots of players in the non-relational, AKA, NoSQL space, but in the document oriented space I don't know of any other current contender other than MongoDB and CouchDB. Do you? Comparing Riak, Cassandra and MongoDB is like comparing a golf cart, a fork lift and a fire engine. They are just too different. But i'd say MongoDB and CouchDB belong in the same category, though MongoDB is optimized for performance in cluster, deployed in a single datacenter, with master-slave replication, and CouchDB is designed for easy and reliable distributed deployment with master-master replication among nodes that are not always online. Their conceptual data model is very similar (JSON and BSON), so it's a snap to migrate data from CouchDB to MongoDB (the opposite maybe more complicated depending on the dataset, because BSON has more primitive types than JSON). Where I work [1] we are doing pilot projects with CouchDB, but we also envision using CouchDB as the main repository for content creation, and pushing data to MongoDB for high demand services, if we find out that CouchDB can't handle the traffic. [1] http://regional.bvsalud.org/php/index.php?lang=en -- Luciano Ramalho programador repentista || stand-up programmer Twitter: @luciano