This is more of a business related post than technical, so bear with me. I love how couchdb works: its elegant, it works how I think, it can accept any reasonably structured data. My decision to make is whether or not to take our company onto this new ground for a mission critical system: customer product data. Technically we call it "inventory" but I plan to keep all of the quantity control in Postgres, so its really just product data. We have some really big customers, with hundreds of thousands of products. It has to work, it can't fail. This data feeds everything else in our system.
I have a vision for this great marriage of Postgres for inventory quantity managment and CouchDB for customer specific product data catalogs, but I'm struggling with what I think our Operations team can realistically manage for keeping these CouchDB systems up, running , backed up, and easily deploying new servers for new customers. Is anyone else in the SaaS business taking the plunge here with CouchDB. Am I insane for even considering it? I'm just tired of writing self joins against unindexed fields in sql to handle variations in product schema per customer, it just doesn't make sense.
