Referenced from an Alexandru Popescu tweet:

So I’ve been obsessively reading about and researching CouchDB over the past couple weeks. I even wrote my own Java client since the ones on the market weren’t up to my standards :) I’ve probably read 200 articles on google explaining the downsides to CouchDB. I’ve read the Use Cases on Couch.io. I’ve read Jan’s book, 10 times. And still I have this one overwhelming question - what can I use it for???

Popescu follows with:

I’ve already said it a couple of times that CouchDB message/positioning is confusing and that current CouchDB case studies aren’t too enlightening either, so hopefully Andy (the passionate guy above) will get some better answers.

It'd be great to see the answer from the CouchDB project, but the bigger problem is that a lot of open source and commercial projects could have the same question asked. There're sites that try to list products that fit in certain domains (java-source.net comes to mind) but it's not authoritative or complete. Plus sites like that would almost always have to rely on domain experts to get things right, and domain experts == bias.

So it kind of falls on the user to know what products are out there for what they're trying to do, and that means a lot of projects are used just because it's the only solution someone knows, like Lucene being used for a document content system instead of an actual content management system. It can be done, sure, but it sucks. (and yeah, I just pissed off all the lucene developers who use lucene like this. Sorry dudes - the information's out there, but that's part of the problem.)

What's the solution? It'd be great to have someone you could go to and ask stuff like "hey, I'm trying to do this project, what should I be looking at" but who would you ask? Nobody keeps up. A site can't even keep up, and it's biased. Who would you trust?

Can projects even do a good job of saying "this is who this is for?"

original post: "What real uses i could use CouchDB for? What can I use it for?"

::A passionate guy asking: "What real uses I could use #CouchDB for? What can I use it for?" « myNoSQLhttp://href.cc/c0HRzO A must read!

I can be blunt and say "if you actually had a problem it could solve, you'd know what it can do for you."

There's this weird meme of looking for problems to apply new tech to, rather than apply new tech to existing problems.

CouchDBs strengths are its replication, native JSON, use of JavaScript and powerful view system, and layering on top of HTTP. It's also competent in being fail safe, while not necessarily being transactional in the typical RDB form.

It's biggest downside is its write performance (it reads better than it writes), it's not "ad hoc" friendly against large data sets, and it's aggressive on disk space.

That's what it is. That's what it does. As a general rule it's stable, and it also has a good community around it.

What can it do for, well, anyone? Who knows? I've been asking that question of SOA and ESBs for years, and yet there still seems to be a large industry surrounding them even though I have yet to see it really applicable in any of MY work.

I think CouchDB message isn't that muddy, I think they promote their assets and benefits pretty clearly. So, basically, maybe the answer for this person is that "They can't use it for anything".