Deployment ruins everything. So many cool technologies that let you develop more rapidly and do awesomely cool stuff fall down at the last hurdle of deployment. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t thought it through properly so it’s just plain too hard, but often it’s just that it’s too hard to convince people that it won’t be another headache for them.

The latest in my deployment-caused frustrations is CouchDB. I have a few use cases that I think CouchDB would be perfect for and it would save me heaps of development effort and headaches. The trouble is, while CouchDB may be of the web, it really isn’t of the enterprise IT architecture.

That’s not to say it wouldn’t fit in perfectly well. It’s not to say there’s anything wrong with CouchDB. It doesn’t even mean that it would be hard to deploy or hard to maintain or anything to do with CouchDB at all. It’s just not part of the enterprise plan for “stuff we put on our servers”. Database stuff goes in Oracle or DB2 and we really don’t need a second database instance running. The fact that CouchDB is an entirely different type of database and has completely different strengths and weaknesses making it perfect for this particular use case doesn’t get a hearing.

When you have big enterprise as your clients, the cool toys always seem just out of reach1.

I’d wish that I worked in an environment that was more relaxed and we could deploy tons of different systems based on what was the best fit for this particular job, except that I have that problem within Ephox and it’s not so much fun either.

1 – like Java versions above 1.4…↩