"Awesome! I can just store things in a JSON-like list and not have another table or anything!" Oh, what if I want to find all the users who have 'ruby' as an interest? Oh, I can only lookup by key? And yes, there are ways around that. You could create a table of interests and each interest would be a key in that table and it would have a list of people with that interest.
This is not true of CouchDB. Indexing is done on the keys generated by arbitrary Javascript views. A view returning results keyed by interest is trivial.
This is not true of CouchDB. Indexing is done on the keys generated by arbitrary Javascript views. A view returning results keyed by interest is trivial.