From #couchdb on Freenode:
balint: so my presentation at the Hungarian Web Conf. is tomorrow and I am sure people would like to see something about performance
balint: (I know, I know: http://jan.prima.de/plok/archives/176-Caveats-of-Evaluating-Databases.html)
balint: it would be great to explain what CouchDB excels in (I guess retrieving by key from views is one area, scalability is another)
jan____: balint: CouchDB makes everything appear easy on the outside. Development in couchdb is easy, because of the schema free nature and the HTTP interface.
jan____: processing lots of data is easy with views. not breaking your server is easy with show and list functions
jan____: backups & failover are easy with replication
jan____: scaling is easy with HTTP, replication & views again
jan____: operation is easy because CouchDB consists of few, well defined parts. if it fails, you know why and where and what to do
jan____: and it is easy to keep your data safe, the storage engine is extremely robust.