I want to save data in CouchDB documents and as I am used to doing it in RDBMS. I want to create a field which can only contain a unique value in the database. If I now save a document and there is already a document with unique key I expect an error from CouchDB.
I guess I can use the document ID and replace the auto generated doc-id by my value, but is there a way to set other field as unique key holder. Any best practice regarding unique keys?
As you said, the generated _id is enforced as unique. That is the only real unique constraint in CouchDB, and some people use it as such for their own applications.
However, this only applies to a single CouchDB instance. Once you start introducing replication and other instances, you can run into conflicts if the same _id is generated on more than 1 node. (depending on how you generate your _ids, this may or may not be a problem)