title: What kind of application would CouchDB be most useful/performant for?
body: <p>I've been messing about with the Ordnance Survey <a href="http://data.gov.uk/node/8831" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Code-Point Open</a> dataset of UK postcodes/co-ordinates. Since <a href="http://www.couch.io/get" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Couch.io</a> were offering a free hosted CouchDB instance I thought I'd put my geo data into one of those, learning a bit about CouchDB in the process.</p>
  
  <p>The idea was that since CouchDB is supposed to be good at handling large datasets (the postcode data is around 1.7 million records) and works natively with REST/JSON, it would tie in nicely with client-side jQuery for use with Google Maps applications.</p>
  
  <p>My initial aim was simply to be able to make an AJAX call with a postcode as a parameter, getting back a single JSON object with lat/lon properties, which I could consume in my script (showing a marker for that postcode). </p>
  
  <p>I've done this successfully, but coming from a relational DB background it was much trickier than I thought; as I read more about CouchDB and play with it a bit I get the impression it wouldn't really be the right tool for this job, were I actually using it for a real-world project.</p>
  
  <p>Am I right in thinking that dynamic queries are a bit of a weakness for CouchDB? Is it more aimed at returning large views which don't change all that often, from large datasets? What might be some examples of 'good' and 'bad' uses of CouchDB, in terms of playing to its strengths?</p>