CouchDB versioning strategy

Question

Would the following be a viable strategy for implementing versioning(using \"example\" as a sample document type):

Have one original document where the type field is

Answer 1

What is the business status of these documents, especially legal? I have worked in situations where your proposal would not be appropriate from a business persepctive, because of a need to prove that the document presented as v.3 really is version 3 of the document. Dynamically applying deltas would not cut the compliance mustard.

If, as you say, changes to documents ae infrequent, then you are not going to be saving much disk space by storing deltas instead of whole documents. Storing whole documents also allows for the reliable prediction of the retrieval time for any document. It also reduces the complexity of the retrieval process.