TLDR: Does CouchDB (conspiring with the OS?) handle thousands of databases well or should I use the tried-and-true-but-aggravating mapping on [group_id, ...] or is there a better pattern that I am unfamiliar with?
I'm building a web application that is group-oriented, by which I mean that each user is interested in documents produced only by the group to which they belong. There is no sharing of information across groups at all. Since these groups are completely isolated, it seems logical to house each one there own database but this makes the side of me familiar with RDBMS very uncomfortable. I found one blog post by John Wood which suggested that there "appears to be no “penalty” for hosting many databases within the same CouchDB server." However, in my case, there would be roughly 1,000 - 5,000 groups. From what I understand, each database is stored as the data file plus various index files. This would mean there are thousands of file handles -- it seems like a bad idea. Thanks in advance, Johnny
