Amazon DynamoDB vs CouchDB

• It's very easy to get started, creating a table with a partition/sort key and you're on your way.
• You can scale up and down your read/write IO as needed.
• You can store structured and unstructured data.
• It works great with Web Development as it's JSON based.

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• It can replicate and sync with web browsers via PouchDB. This lets you keep a synced copy of your database on the client-side, which offers much faster data access than continuous HTTP requests would allow, and enables offline usage.
• Simple Map/Reduce support. The M/R system lets you process terabytes of documents in parallel, save the results, and only need to reprocess documents that have changed on subsequent updates. While not as powerful as Hadoop, it is an easy to use query system that's hard to screw up.
• Sharding and Clustering support. As of CouchDB 2.0, it supports clustering and sharding of documents between instances without needing a load balancer to determine where requests should go.
• Master to Master replication lets you clone, continuously backup, and listen for changes through the replication protocol, even over unreliable WAN links.

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• Complex searching (no support for case-insensitive or full-text search).
• Only supports up to two-key indexes.
• Requires choosing the indexes up-front when doing searches.
• Does not have an SQL compatible query front-end.
• No join-table support (requires putting all data into one table).

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• NoSQL DB can become a challenge for seasoned RDBMS users.
• The map-reduce paradigm can be very demanding for first-time users.
• JSON format documents with Key-Value pairs are somewhat verbose and consume more storage.

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• Since the Amazon manages the instance, the amount of time a developer needs to spend configuring the database is less. For comparison, if we were to manage the same instance manually, we need to set up EC2 instance, install the DB, setup backup scripts, track backup failures, which is a great overhead for the dev. Using DynamoDB this overhead is reduced and hence having a great ROI.
• Great documentation and easy setup makes an easy learning curve to transition to DynamoDB. Only caveat is as with any database, the data structure should be thoroughly analyzed for types of querying because there are limitations with the DynamoDB API.
• Ties very well with rest of the Amazon eco system. Having rest of the applications in Amazon allows managing the application security a breeze.

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• It has saved us hours and hours of coding.
• It is has taught us a new way to look at things.
• It has taught us patience as the first few weeks with CouchDB were not pleasant. It was not easy to pick up like MongoDB.

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