This document provides an introduction to CouchDB on Rails. It discusses CouchDB's support for high availability, easy replication, clustering, and short recovery times. CouchDB uses JSON documents and JavaScript for querying and aggregating data. Views allow indexing and querying documents. SimplyStored provides an ActiveRecord-like interface for CouchDB. RockingChair provides an in-memory version of CouchDB for testing. The document also covers CouchDB replication, load balancing, caching, sharding, and other features.