> Great question, I'd say no it runs entirely against the grain of what > CouchDB is. Documents aren't supposed to be related to one another. But > relational databases don't handle this kind of thing either so I figure why > not CouchDB as it offers other features that solve lots of problems.
I think in most practical apps that Couch targets there are relationships between docs. The canonical Blog example has comments that are children of a parent post. I think the emphasis on reminding people that CouchDB is not relational tends to lead people to the conclusion that the documents won't be related in some way. Of course CouchDB doesn't have any built in way to specify those relationships. I've been playing around with conventions for specifying doc relationships and how an app layer would make those relationships easy to handle. It seems to be quite useful so far. It would be interesting to see if it was possible / sensible to push some of that further down into CouchDB. -- Kerr
