A Gentle Introduction to CouchDB for Relational Practitioners

I've used it with rails for a short time now, still trying to dig deeper -- I really don't know if it's more reliable or mature than Mongo, but it was also a relatively pleasant experience. Also, I do know that it integrates very nicely with rails, and that you should use couchrest with it if you're on rails (http://github.com/couchrest/couchrest).

Side comment: learning to write map reduce algos instead of just querying was kind of difficult at first (for document databases in general). The article seems to have neglected to mention it -- it had the steepest learning curve in the overall couch-learning process for me.

I haven't written any CouchApps (I really don't like JS so much I'd like to write my whole app in it, even though the notion is quite awesome), but I've used CouchDB in a few projects. Most importantly, we've been using it at work, where it's awesome at solving some of our problems. Streaming replication to our off-site backup server was almost trivial setup and makes it easy to switch our entire operation to the using the backup server instead of the local network. Map/reduce queries have made it possible to provide very fast overviews of large amounts of data. And it's just awesome that you can debug your queries by firing off HTTP requests from your browser...

Oh yeah, and Futon is an awesome tool. On some of the sites where I've been too lazy to build CMS tools, I'm just using it to update the site, and it works quite well for that. It also makes it easy to just jump in and fix something up whenever you need to.

not natively. try couch + lucene. http://github.com/rnewson/couchdb-lucene