Radu Stanciu talked to us about how he first discovered CouchDB and what his experience has been employing it in applications.

How did you hear about CouchDB, and why did you choose to use it?

Back in 2011 I was looking for an easy and fast solution to serve static files over HTTP. I then discovered the easy to use HTTP API for data access and I immediately fell in love with it.

Did you have a specific problem that CouchDB solved?

I use CouchDB as an application platform, it serves the UI code which then connect to the REST endpoints to fetch or save data. The big problem I had that CouchDB solved was having access to 100m+ records in a timely fashion. The persisted indexes and the MapReduce implementation nicely achieves that.

For the folks who are unsure of how they could use CouchDB–because there are a lot of databases out there—could you explain the use case?

I use it because it offers so much functionality with a minimal stack. Full HTTP access is a crucial feature I use that allows interacting with the database over many systems and networks. The replication system is just awesome.

What would you say is the top benefit of using CouchDB?

It’s highly reliable, while also delivering great performance.

What tools are you using in addition for your infrastructure? Have you discovered anything that pairs well with CouchDB?

I run the couchapp as a desktop application interface with the embedded Chromium engine.

What are your future plans with your project? Any cool plans or developments you want to promote?

For every embedded device project I tinker with (I love the Raspberry PI), CouchDB is the base of the stack to handle data and network.

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