Anyone here using couchdb? Any thoughts about it? Advice? Practical uses? Any comment is very much welcome :)

Don't force it on the students of your high school intro to web design class. That's all I have to offer.

We're using Couch at my new job. Been here about 6 months. So far my impression of it is that its both super powerful and super limited at the same time, but in different ways.

The biggest PROs are that it is completely dynamic and just gets along so well with JavaScript (because it's all based on JavaScript), so working with CouchDB from a web app is a perfect match. It has many of the same strenghts/weaknesses of JavaScript because of it: documents have no schema and can contain any arbitrary objects, which makes working with the database simpler, but it also exposes the potential for bugs and invalid data.

On the other hand, the biggest limitation of it is that it does not support arbitrary querying. Couch works on the notion of compiled views (my term, there's probably an official term for it) where you establish the definition of a view and then *all* new documents are piped through that view. Changing an existing view requires reprocessing ALL your documents, which can be slow.