Promoting Couch-DB to management [closed]

Question

I've run a series of somewhat brutal tests against CouchDB 0.10 and it handled itself well (ex. the server's netstack caved in but best I can tell CouchDB was still functioning ). Unfortunately none of that really matters if I can't convince clients and employers to allow me to use it*.

Common fears I've heard.

1. "It's only Version .10, thats not even a production release!!!"

2. "But [MySQL|PostGres|Oracle] works fine for [object metadata storage|literal "document" storage|etc]!"

3. "This seems overly complicated ( map reduce based queries, REST api, JSON, etc ) compared to XYZ."

4. "What the hell is an erlang?"

*Normally my rule is to tell the client I will solve the problem, but not go into detail. Unfortunately some client's fancy themselves as back seat architects/engineers or are rightfully wanting to be informed.

**Pre-emptively arguing this is programming related because sometimes it doesn't matter how much better a tool is if management can't/won't see the benefit over risk of stepping outside what is known.

Answer 1

Some years ago I had the same problem trying to convince customers to use python + postgreSQL for the web instead of asp, php, or whatever.

What worked for me, besides explaining the technical advantages, was adding some success stories.

In CouchDB case you might cite:

• BBC: Erlang at the BBC
• Meebo http://code.google.com/p/couchdb-lounge/
• Ubuntu: Ubuntu One
• Mozilla

In this presentation there's a slide citing other companies.