This blog post is 9 years old! Most likely, its content is outdated. Especially if it's technical.

I was reading this article about linkfluence moving from CouchDB to Riak

We were already aware of Riak before we started using CouchDB, but we werent sure about trusting a new product at this point, so we decided, after some benchmark, to go for CouchDB.

After the first couple of months, it was obvious that this was a bad choice.

Our main problems with CouchDB is scalability, versionning and stability.

Once we store a document in CouchDB, we modify it at least twice after the original write. Each modification generates a new version of the document. This feature is nice for some use-cases, but we dont need it, and theres no way to disable it, so the size of our databases started to become really important. Youll probably tell me hey, you know you can compact your database ?, and Ill answer sure. The trouble is that we never managed to get it to compact an entire database without crashing (well, to be honest, with the last version of CouchDB we finally managed to compact one database).

The second issue is that one database == one file. When you have multiple small databases, this is fine. When you a have only a few databases, and some grow to more than 1TB, the problems keep growing too (and its a real pain to backup).

We also had a lot of random crashes with CouchDB, even if the last version was quite stable."