Jack, It's definitely horses for courses stuff, but a few of items in couch's favour that we like (but were are no experts!) are:
1. Its Apache 2.0 license vs MongoDB's AGPL. So if you're looking to use it commercially then it's more friendly 2. Couchdb seems to have a very vibrant eco system i.e. there's a lot of add-on's etc such a couchapp (automatically replicates your applications with your data if your comfortable with that design pattern that is), Big Couch, for scale out, etc, etc and then there's the commercial offering from couchbase, although there seems to be a few incompatibilities if you want to upgrade from couchdb pure (open source or commercial) to couchbase (i.e. couchdb plus memcache) 3. Its ridiculously easy to install and then administer when compared with more traditional DBMS's, backup wise you can just copy the datafiles live! 4. If you need it has document versioning and then coupled with that unlimited multi master replication, which is actually pretty a pretty rare commodity; 5. The restful API is nice also We use CouchDB as a datawarehouse for processing/analysing JSON documents, so lightning fast performance is not critical, if performance is critical and you can live with the license MongoDB may be a better option. I believe the performance side of couchdb is gradually being addressed as part of the couchbase work. Oddly enough (and one of the reasons open source is so great) the Mongodb web site has a good comparison: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Comparing+Mongo+DB+and+Couch+DB Also I always find the following useful when I have to question why I chose one NOSQL vs another! http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis MICHAEL KIMBER | PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT d : +44 (0)28 9078 8378 -----Original Message----- From: Roman Geber [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 12 December 2011 10:27 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Question on what is CouchDB's strength Hi, for me one of the greatest strength is its capability to store the apps used to work with your data. Couchapps take some getting used to, but they are very convineint and fully integrated. I wrote a blog post about couchdb's features and linked some of the resources I use a lot here: http://romangeber.com/2011/11/18/couchdb-roundup/ cu Roman On 12/12/2011 02:41 AM, jack chrispoo wrote: > Hi all, > > I am new to CouchDB. I and my friends have been evaluating several > datastores including Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB in terms of update, > read, insert, scan throughput and latency. In our tests CouchDB performs > worst in all tests. I once read about some saying that because CouchDB is > written in Erlang, throughput and lantency is not CouchDB's strength. So > can someone tell me some advantages of CouchDB compared to other > datastores? I did look into views, but it seems that other datastores have > similar funtionalities - MongoDB can also execute javascript to generate > result, HBase has filter. So what exactly is CouchDB's strength? > > I'll be grateful to any comments, Thanks, > > jack >
