same problem for years explaining what Lotus Notes is. The odd thing is 
that to a lay person it is way easier to understand the concept of a 
document and a bunch of views than it is to understand tables, 
relations, left inner joins, compound keys, fourth normal form etc.

Alan.


Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> that's probably right.  We have a similar problem with MongoDB - once 
> you have to start explaining the fundamental differences, the battle 
> is lost.  They are just too different from RDBMS.
>
> geir
>
> On Jan 3, 2009, at 9:03 PM, Noah Slater wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 04:25:14PM -0500, Patrick Aljord wrote:
>>> There is nothing wrong in comparing two databases, many users don't 
>>> really
>>> care about the internals and just want to know which one is the best 
>>> for most
>>> jobs. I personally think couchdb is good for most apps that need a 
>>> good db :)
>>
>> Firstly, thanks for the write up Paul.
>>
>> However, after looking at the feedback from the CouchDB book and 
>> monitoring the
>> community response to CouchDB I am starting to feel that any kind of 
>> comparison
>> to RDBMS is a harmful one, unless done very, very carefully.
>>
>> -- 
>> Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater
>