CouchDB Pros and Cons

CouchDB is well-designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: mobile sync. It does this job fairly well, given other tools like PouchDB which can be used to sync across the two. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CouchDB is lacking in other features when compared to alternative document databases like MongoDB. No document-based security options, no backend tools or connectors, no builtin support for other platforms. Moreover, there is substantially less documentation when compared to other platforms. Also: performance-wise, CouchDB does not compare to other database engines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apache has good ideas, most of them are very useful. CouchDB is one of those good ideas, but I wouldn't classify it as useful. It's good to have a company as Apache supporting the tool, I think it has a great future, but we still haven't found it's value. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It resolves a non-existent problem. Why would I use CouchDB and not MongoDB or ElasticSearch? It's still not clear to me. I also found the documentation extremely boring and old school and the books I found do not seem interesting.

The community is very small, I had trouble finding answers to basic questions I had during the time I was trying it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like couchdb because it is light weight and easy to deploy. The web UI also makes it quick to test map reduce functions against your data. Because couchdb is restful integrating it with web apps is very easy. Replicating couchdb is also very easy which is nice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like couchdb to have a better documentation on tuning it for high connection usage. Also replication is nice for a flat model but it would be nice to see some way of seeing easily if replication is delayed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CouchDB is the simplest database I've ever worked with and one of the most powerful.

It uses HTTP verbs for interact with the database which is very intuitive and clear.

The query mechanism is very different from RDBMS and has learning curve but once you get the hang of it it's really amazing what you can accomplish with it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The admin interface is pretty young and has limitations such as it hard to search, at least at the beginning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best feature of CouchDB is it's simplicity and use of familiar technology and concepts:

- A RESTful API means I can use any language to access it (even using shell and curl).

- It plays well in the HTTP-based world with things like proxy servers, load balancers, and SSL offloading.

- Map/reduce functions written in Javascript allow me to create dynamic web pages via lists & shows.

- APIs to assist in the integration of CouchDB with other technologies:

* change API lets me connect to Elasticsearch using logstash

* os_daemons support lets me integrate external apps and services into CouchDB environment

- Replication is simple and powerful in both master-master and master-slave modes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

#1 issue with using CouchDB is lack of consolidated documentation on how to solve issues. Forgive me authors, but the books out there are not great. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of time searching for answers. If this is your first NoSQL/document database, prepare for a learning curve mostly on your own. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Stable and smart replication, especially in pair with PouchDB, and full REST API.

Formal documentation is full and well structured. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Built-in Javascript query server is slooooow. Overall CRUD performance is also quiet weak.

Product site looks bit outdated and messy and is not focused on users‘ needs.

New 2.0 preview is at least not faster then previous version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Super fast read speed and flexibility of storing data as JSON strings. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not a dislike, but this database isn't suitable for storing data such as images. It's meant for fast reading smaller chunks of data quickly. Also write speeds are fast but not blazing. It's not a fault, but something you need to consider depending on your application Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In many ways, I found CouchDB to be a web developer's dream database. With an HTTP interface for every aspect of its API and the Futon admin app built right in, it's incredibly easy to create and browse documents -- far easier than finding a client to browse your SQL holdings. The simple yet powerful map-reduce interface really adds a lot of value as well. Overall, I found CouchDB to be a great solution if you need the flexibility of a schema-less, JSON document store, and you are interested in very well defined queries of some of your attributes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While the map-reduce interface provides easy indexing for specific queries, CouchDB is not designed for search. Separating "queries" from "search" is the important aspect here for me. I see CouchDB as an excellent choice when you can define indexes that slice data in a very specific way across a handful of defined attributes. However, most of my apps lately tend to be search related, with the need to query across many dynamic fields at once. They also tend to require spatial, full text, and metadata (range, etc.) filters simultaneously and CouchDB just doesn't offer that. For that reason, we've migrated to Elasticsearch as our primary data store instead.

Also, while the ability to replicate data across nodes is great, in general we didn't really end up using it and probably would have preferred a clustering solution instead of a full replication. If you are not using this feature, it can also get in the way a bit due to the overhead of carrying around potentially lots of revision metadata. For instance, we found it difficult at times to find ideal maintenance windows to perform database compaction of our revisions because we were very write heavy throughout the day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Use CouchDB is a sensation of freedom from tables or SQL rules. Your app will be able to be more flexible Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CouchDB use your all disk if you do not be careful. You index system could be dangerous and freeze you system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Firstly, CouchDB is very easy to learn and implement. It has rich api's and is well documented, easy to follow manual and installation guide with clear examples.

I have used CouchDB java clients Ektorp and CouchDB4J for implementation and is very easy to implement. What I really liked about CouchDB was the Futon interface, it gives live map of the NoSQL database, it is easy to track the Collection objects, modify them on the fly and also gives quick view of the entire schema Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CouchDB is really if the requirement is to build a light weight database structure, keep it simple and performance is priority, but then again this holds good for small scale requirements. Unlike MongoDB which I feel is much more robust than CouchDB, provides various options for implementation, there are options for replication, sharding, monitoring and has provides feature rich interfaces which CouchDB lacks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.