Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Relaxing on the Couch

CouchDB lives up to its tag line: relax. Instead of focusing on working well only in massive clusters running on hundreds of nodes, CouchDB aims to support a variety of deployment scenarios from the datacenter down to the smartphone. You can run CouchDB on your Android phone, on your MacBook, and in your datacenter. Written in Erlang, CouchDB is built tough—the only way to shut it down is to kill the process! With its append-only storage model, your data is virtually incorruptible and easy to replicate, back up, and restore.

CouchDB is document oriented, using JSON as its storage and communication language. All calls to CouchDB happen through its REST interface. Replication can be one way (from one database to another) ...