I'd actually vote for the "sensible, forward-looking approach." The BBC 
(for one) is already using CouchDB in a production: 
http://damienkatz.net/2010/03/bbc_and_couchdb.html

That said, NoSQL as a "movement" is as wide and varied as the RDBMS 
world, and there are pros and cons to each. I'm personally a proponent 
of CouchDB because it's RESTful API, JSON storage system, and JavaScript 
(or Erlang, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc) map/reduce view engine. If your 
project need replication at all (whether for scaling, data sharing, 
etc), I'd take a good hard look at CouchDB as that's it's core 
distinction among the other NoSQL databases.

Hope that helps,
Benjamin

-- 
President
BigBlueHat
P: 864.232.9553
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminyoung


On 4/12/10 10:55 AM, Thomas Dowling wrote:
> So let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a colleague tells you he's
> considering a NoSQL database like MongoDB or CouchDB, to store a couple
> tens of millions of "documents", where a document is pretty much an
> article citation, abstract, and the location of full text (not the full
> text itself).  Would your reaction be:
>
> "That's a sensible, forward-looking approach.  Lots of sites are putting
> lots of data into these databases and they'll only get better."
>
> "This guy's on the bleeding edge.  Personally, I'd hold off, but it could
> work."
>
> "Schedule that 2012 re-migration to Oracle or Postgres now."
>
> "Bwahahahah!!!"
>
> Or something else?
>
>
>
> (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL>  is a good jumping-in point.)
>
>
>