I've just started evaluating CouchDB and so far I'm very impressed. I've been comparing it to Amazon's SimpleDB in particular, and couchdb looks like a great alternative.
One thing that I haven't found in the couchdb API that surprises me, however, it a way to directly add or modify individual fields within a document. For example, how would I efficiently update just one field in a few thousand large-ish documents? Looking at the current API, it seems like I would have retrieve each document in its entirety, update that one field, then write back the entire document. I see there is a way to bulk write many documents at once, but that's only a small improvement. Have I missed something? If not, is this ability planned for the future? My first thought was that this could be implemented this with server-side script functions related to views and/or with HTTP methods on field URIs. Thanks, -Brad
