Hallo! I've been recently thinking about the possible different design choices offered by CouchDB, and - more generally - by Document Oriented Databases. Specifically, I considered the case of web applications like Amazon.com, where they need to have full consistency in some specific "fields", like item availability; still, in the biggest part of their database (the one about item descriptions, user details etc.), they can get huge benefits from a document oriented database. How do they solve the problem of consistency? I think a good solution could be to use a two-database design, with a standard SQL database to store only item availability and critical data, and another document oriented database for everything else. Of course, a cross database relation has to be built. I've read that SimpleDB by amazon also offers eventual consistency, like CouchDB; and they also state that they're using SimpleDB for the amazon.comwebsite. So, how do they solve this problem?
Goodbye! Andrea Schiavini
