On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Bill Dueber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Oops. I just found a better overview than I can provide, at
> http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Comparing+Mongo+DB+and+Couch+DB

I was just about to send that link.

> There are lots of other players in this space, too -- see
> http://nosql-database.org/

It depends on how you define "that space". There are lots of players
in the non-relational, AKA, NoSQL space, but in the document oriented
space I don't know of any other current contender other than MongoDB
and CouchDB. Do you?

Comparing Riak, Cassandra and MongoDB is like comparing a golf cart, a
fork lift and a fire engine. They are just too different.

But i'd say MongoDB and CouchDB belong in the same category, though
MongoDB is optimized for performance in cluster, deployed in a single
datacenter, with master-slave replication, and CouchDB is designed for
easy and reliable distributed deployment with master-master
replication among nodes that are not always online.

Their conceptual data model is very similar (JSON and BSON), so it's a
snap to migrate data from CouchDB to MongoDB (the opposite maybe more
complicated depending on the dataset, because BSON has more primitive
types than JSON).

Where I work [1] we are doing pilot projects with CouchDB, but we also
envision using CouchDB as the main repository for content creation,
and pushing data to MongoDB for high demand services, if we find out
that CouchDB can't handle the traffic.

[1] http://regional.bvsalud.org/php/index.php?lang=en

-- 
Luciano Ramalho
programador repentista || stand-up programmer
Twitter: @luciano