

Ask HN: Thoughts on CouchDB vs. SimpleDB - Readmore

I've decided to use a document based DB for my next project but I'm still in the discovery phase when it comes to SimpleDB vs. CouchDB.<p>They both seem to offer the same type of functionality, although from my initial research it seems like SimpleDB has more traditional query options. Any thought from HN readers who have used either, or preferably both, of these products?
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jmah
SimpleDB is a service, whereas CouchDB stands alone. So you can install
CouchDB locally, mess around with it and hack on the source.

Aside from that, CouchDB has views, which add another layer of indirection
when reading the data. You break your data up into separate documents, where
each doc is a collection of values that should be updated together
(atomically). Then you use views to transform your docs to the way your data
is displayed. (For example, you could store a blog post and each comment as
separate documents, and have a view that returns a post and all its related
comments together.) SimpleDB doesn't have this complexity.

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Readmore
Very nice explanation, thanks for your input.

I have read a little about the Filter/View system of CouchDB and I didn't
really get the point as it just felt overly complex. Your blog/comment example
helped though.

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alexkay
Great question! I would also like to know how these two compare to Google's
BigTable?

