struggling with couchdb: the problem of multiple databases

[Jurg van Vliet <ju...@truthtrap.com>]

people,

we have a group of people that organizes itself in several overlapping  
project teams. we are planning to offer a web app that lets this group  
organize itself along these lines and work together. they can can  
basically share and discuss information.

i believe couchdb is perfect for a case like this. but i don't exactly  
know how to model this, and/or where i can expect problems to arise.

as the group of people is fairly large and the nr of projects is  
difficult to predict i do think we have to scale, somehow. i also  
think that people wil want to take their data with them, on mobile or  
in plains, anywhere.

we have chosen to use one database that describes the state of the  
group (users, projects, etc.) and every project (environment) has its  
own database, with everything necessary for that project and its team  
to be able to work.

so far everything is fine, but we will soon run into 2 problems
1. search the entire system
2. aggregating information

search is evident. but there might be one catch. a user might not have  
rights to see everything, and those rights are most probably different  
for every user. you would like to show a user its combined status in  
some places. examples like 'your last 10 remarks' are obvious. this is  
not straightforward in the setup we have chosen.

how to deal with these use cases in a couchdb (rails) environment?

groet,
jurg.