multi user/login best practices

[Tim Kuijsten <in...@netsend.nl>]

I've created a single page app that is going to be used by different 
commercial parties and was wondering what are the best practices to 
divide the databases.

Currently I think of one database per commercial party (with possibly 
different users all having the same access rights).

In the future I might split up some databases into one database per 
subdivision. I'm not really tempted by creating one database per user, 
especially because i need to have somewhat logical/maintainable url's 
(from both an aesthetic and an administrators point of view) and like to 
use the e-mail addresses of users for their usernames so there is no 
direct mapping from username to database name (since @ and . are not 
allowed in a database name, apart from the fact that the url starts 
looking unacceptably bad with usernames in it).

All apps need authentication so I've setup a public database hosting the 
jquery.couchLogin.js app which asks, after successful authentication, 
for a custom "usertodb" document from the public database. This document 
hosts a mapping between usernames and database names. Then this public 
app redirects to the corresponding url and/or db.

Currently I'm not sure whether to use different domains/subdomains per 
database or subdirs.

I'd like to hear experiences/best practices/feedback from other people 
who had a somewhat similar case, since this is my first couchdb project.

ps. I'd need couchdb-lucene to work with the setup, up till now I only 
tested it on a single db.