In case anybody is interested I put some notes from my CouchDB talk online . These include some brief notes on three high-level interfaces to CouchDB for Ruby: CouchPotato, CouchRest::ExtendedDocument, and CouchFoo. On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Jesse Hallett wrote: > Thanks Jan!  I suspected that the slower performance from CouchDB was > caused by a combination of HTTP latency and frequent disk flushes. > Your articles help give me the big picture of those tradeoffs.  I will > definitely emphasize CouchDB's fault tolerance and distributability > tonight. > > On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Jan Lehnardt wrote: >> Cool, good luck! :) >> >> If you need some fuel on the number thing: >> >> http://jan.prima.de/~jan/plok/archives/175-Benchmarks-You-are-Doing-it-Wrong.html >> http://jan.prima.de/~jan/plok/archives/176-Caveats-of-Evaluating-Databases.html >> >> Cheers >> Jan >> -- >> >> On 1 Sep 2009, at 17:50, Jesse Hallett wrote: >> >>> I will be giving a presentation on CouchDB tonight at the Portland Ruby >>> Brigade Meeting, which runs from 7-9pm at Robert Half Technology, 222 SW >>> Columbia St, Portland, OR .  If >>> there are any folks on the list who are in Portland and are interested, I >>> would be thrilled to see you there. >>> >>> The focus of the talk will be on high-level Ruby interfaces to CouchDB. >>>  But >>> there will be a lot of people at the meeting who don't know much about >>> CouchDB or why they would want to use it.  So I will also give some >>> background and explain what sort of things CouchDB is good at. >>> >>> At the last meeting there was another presentation comparing the >>> performances of several new database systems with benchmarks.  CouchDB did >>> very poorly in these benchmarks, compared to Tokyo Tyrant, MongoDB, and >>> the >>> usual SQL implemenations, for every operation except for retrieving >>> documents in bulk.  One of the challenges I will face will be explaining >>> that there are applications where CouchDB is the best choice despite those >>> numbers. >> >> >