This is what I found in my experience as well. I founded a startup in 2013 (and ran it for 3 years) and used Couchbase as our primary data store (a saas that integrates with web sites as customers that received tens of millions DAU). With no dev ops person, running it was easy, and we've never had performance or outage issues. I know you can't compare a document store/kv store with a relational DB like PG or Mysql, but I have wondered why couchbase is not as popular as say Mongo.

I can give you one hint. I don't really work with databases, so I'm not well-versed on them, but I can easily name all the major RDBMSes (PG, MySQL, Oracle, etc.), and some of the NoSQL ones. I've done a little work at home playing with Postgres, but that's about it.

I've certainly heard about MongoDB many, many times. I've heard of Redis some. I've heard of CouchDB. But this is the very first time I've ever heard of "Couchbase".

It was popular briefly on HN back in 2015, so it had a late start compared to Mongo which was maybe 2012? And the commercialization of memcached was perhaps noticed most by PHP devs, as memcached is common enough with Wordpress and Drupal, though Redis might have overtaken it some. I always thought couchbase was a very interesting idea but never had the chance to seriously suggest it at work. These endorsements actually help me consider it, but at the time it seemed like they didn’t do a great job explaining who was using it and why/how it made a difference. I’ve heard more, recently, about using DocumentDB or CockroachDB than it, actually. And most places I work at are still riding the Postgres/Oracle/SQL traditional database shop, where it’s easier to introduce Redis or Memcached than to switch where all the data is stored. Using it for a new project would require buy in, but might be viable.

Mongo's marketing team. The near 1:1 logical mapping for Node.js and other languages with object structures. It's effective, and very easy to use.

Compared to a closer example like RethinkDB, which was really cool, but nowhere near the money and marketing team ultimately failed. Rethink started in terms of stable data first, performance tuning from there... mongo went the opposite approach and caught up on the stability later. Of course scaling mongo and administration isn't as easy as a single node, or multiple read-replicas.

> but I have wondered why couchbase is not as popular as say Mongo

Because MongoDB is a single binary to download and install and has one of the simplest config files around.

It's arguably the easiest database to use and operate.

Ditto. I loved using Couchbase at my previous job (Blizzard Entertainment) and I'm using at my current gig (FinTech) and I've never understood how such an excellent product has such terrible marketing. It blows Mongo out of the water.

If you're looking for a super low-latency (everything sub-millisecond) document/json store with strong resiliency options, cross-data centre replication, options for optimistic/pessimistic locking, json sub document access and modification, etc etc, I don't know why you'd use anything else.

Bit of a silly question, but how would you say Couchbase compares to something like CouchDB? I've never used Couchbase directly, but I've always really enjoyed the simplicity of CouchDB.

Would you be willing to rely on this for something like tracking election results?

It really depends on your specific environment in terms of how much you are, or are not willing to lose information and it's all relative. I'm a fan of high performing databases (couchbase), or those more tunable (ScyllaDB/Cassandra), or build for indexing (elasticsearch), or those built for consistency (sql).

Each have their use cases, and there's definitely overlap. Understanding the difference and using the right tool for the job is important.