I've never thought about posting one of the many brain dumps I put in txt files because I figured it would only make sense to me in such a rough draft... but after reading this I will have to start. Very helpful overview of all aspects of CouchDB / document based storage.
"if you need a change in your schema, it's dead simple to do--just start using the new schema
if you don't care that the old documents don't have the new field, you don't have to worry about them"<p>For me the scary part is that I usually <i>do</i> care. How do you stop caring about this? Doesn't this mean your application code starts to get populated with if/then/else? Is there a best-practice for backfilling data when the (effective) schema changes?
I found Damien Katz's talk about quitting and risking it on CouchDB to be really great (from resources):
<a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me</a>
I'd be interested to hear a little bit about choosing between CouchDB, MongodB, and others. Couch and Mongo are the two I'm most interested in, but I haven't had the time to really look at either closely.