<p>I've followed the <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/index.html" rel="noreferrer">CouchDB</a> project with interest over the last couple of years, and see it is now an Apache Incubator project. Prior to that, the CouchDB web site was full of <em>do not use for production code</em> type disclaimers, so I'd done no more than keep an eye on it. I'd be interested to know your experiences if you've been using CouchDB either for a live project, or a technology pilot. </p>

I got to know one of the people (Jan) working on it a while ago (like 6 months) and have been playing with it ever since. I found the community around CouchDB to be both very knowledgable and helpful so that whenever I ran into an issue it was resolved in a matter of minutes or hours at least.
We just kicked off a project the other week which basically requires us to store data in the non-relational way and due to CouchDB's document oriented store we selected it as one of the technologies to use. So this is actually the first time that I will run it in production, but I'm still pretty confident about it. :)
Just an update here (2009-10-25):
Our first CouchDB install is 20 GB, it hosts 40 million records. It's been running in production since January 2009, and it's been great. Read (
```
GET
```
) speed is outstanding and we use it as a store for complex data, and then it's just pull.
Our second couchdb installment has two databases, one is 160,000,000+ documents (210 GB), and growing between 150,000-300,000 documents a day. The other is
only
35,000,000 documents (7 GB). This setup has a lot more reads and writes and initial tests are performing very well.
View building on the 160,000,000 document database took roughly a week, but since then we upgraded to a larger Amazon EC2 instance and we are also getting ready to update to CouchDB
```
0.10.x
```
(from
```
0.9.1
```
) as this release includes a lot of performance improvements in view building.