Following my question here I am exmploring ideas for a generic approach to document versioning in CouchDB. While I imagine there may be no canonical approach, I had the following idea and am looking for feedback. I would like to maintain readable document ids as much as possible, so a document existing at /document1 would contain a pointer document to all existing versions on the system. The actual revision documents would be at something like /document1/308ef032a3801a where 308ef032a3801a is some random number or hash. Example The pointer document { "_id" : "document1", "versions" : [ "document1/308ef032a3801a" ] } The version document { "_id" : "document1/308ef032a3801a", ... actual content }