One of the things I largely underestimated when I first started working with CouchDb was the importance of a meaningful ID for documents. The default of letting the database set a UUID for you seems reasonable at first, but the UUID is largely useless for querying. On the other hand, a good ID scheme is like having a free index for which you don’t have to maintain a view. You can just query using the _all_docs view, which is built in. Well thought out ID’s can save you tons of headaches and fiddling with views later. Particularly with large data sets, this can be a big deal, because views can take up a significant amount of storage space and processing. Unfortunately, they are hard to change after you get a lot of data in the database, so it is worth thinking about before you get very far into the data.