The document introduces CouchDB as a document-oriented database that aims to solve scaling and data storage problems through its use of non-locking concurrency control, replication, and modeling data in JSON documents rather than tables. It discusses how CouchDB scales similarly to Rails applications and provides access to data through a RESTful HTTP API. The document also covers using CouchDB with Ruby through libraries like CouchRest and shows examples of basic operations and more advanced features like views and validation.