There’s no schema for Science – CouchDB in Research
Erlang Factory 2011 video of presentation by Nitin Borwankar on CouchDB.
From the website:
The cutting edge and constantly evolving nature of scientific research makes it very hard to use relational databases to model scientific data. When a hypothesis changes, the observations change and the schema changes – large volumes of data may have to be migrated. This makes it very hard for researchers and they end up using spreadsheets and flat files since they are more flexible. Enter CouchDB and the schemaless model. The talk will take three real world examples and generalize to extract some principles and help identify where you might apply these.