Why is CouchDB popular?

Question

Why is CouchDB so popular among non-relational databases?

Answer 1

Probably because it's well promoted and quite good at what it does.

Answer 2

Here is a pretty good introduction

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7597/1.html

Snip from article:

You’ll often see the word “relax” associated with CouchDB. That’s because CouchDB tries to solve a lot of the “hard problems” associated with building a scalable distributed document-oriented database. It does a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can focus on building your application without worrying too much about administration or weird corner cases.

CouchDB also sports a very simple and easy to understand RESTful API. This should make for a very low barrier to entry and stress-free development. As we progress through the process of using CouchDB, I think you’ll start to realize that this motto is not just “marketing speak.”

Answer 3

As the late, great Eric Morecombe once observed, "Sofa, so good".

Answer 4

1. It's well-suited to a good portion of web app development today where scalability and online/offline sysc are important (additionally, the strength of relational database's powerful data set analysis is often less important).
2. Arguably trivial replication built-in (replication is an afterthought in the lineage of most RDBMS ecosystems)
3. It's emerging as an essential part of the stack upon which desktop/cloud sync services in the open source arena are being built (see Ubuntu One).

Because of #3, there's a decent marketing/awareness campaign behind it right now.