Couch Trouble

I’ve been wrangling with CouchDB for a few weeks now, and it’s starting to feel a bit like this:

(Ooh, my first embedded video. Feel the Web 2.0 Awesome-ness-age-ality).

First, let me say that I can’t really blame CouchDB for any of my troubles, which are essentially:

• There are a excess of Ruby/Rails gems for accessing CouchDB, all of whom have different dependencies and do things in slightly different ways. I’m sure that eventually a consensus will emerge on the best Ruby/CouchDB way of doing things, but it hasn’t happened yet.
• CouchDB is not yet 1.0, so the design can support lots of spiffy features that don’t actually exist yet. Specifically, the lack of partial replication stalled my attempts at using Couch for a distributed media server project.
• CouchDB doesn’t work perfectly for absolutely everything (whoda thunkit?). My other big project (more on that later) isn’t really Document-Oriented, no matter how much I try to beat it flat. I’m now thinking Git is actually be best storage solution, and if you understand Gits internals well enough, you’ll see how mind-warping that concept is.

So I think I’ll put CouchDB down for a while, at least until 1.0, or until I run across a project where it’s appropriate. Of course, it’s still a gazillion times better than any RDBMS …