In our interview with Nick Vatamaniuc, he shared the value of being able to open Fauxton and inspect, query and modify data, stating it is a powerful and useful feature.  He went on to explain that he can speed up product development, for example by letting a front end developer populate the database by hand; with some “mock” data and a few mouse clicks they can refine their design. He stated that it can also help in production when something isn’t working quite right and there is a need to see the state in the database, noting that for newcomers this makes it easy to learn and experiment.

Joan Touzet was one of the developers who felt that CouchDB’s powerful and versatile secondary indexing capabilities was worth a mention. “Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but you can do all sorts of interesting things.” She went on to state that for simple indexing, CouchDB has the Mango library in 2.0 and if you want to get more complex, you can write a JavaScript Map/Reduce function. In addition, there are open source add-ons for full-text search and robust geo indexing, too. Joan wrapped it up by stating that she’s yet to find a kind of indexing that she’s been unable to do when having such tools at her disposal.