How to remove corrupted documents from CouchDB
Once a corrupted document is written to CouchDB it's not completely straightforward how to get it out again. Having such a document in the DB can bring the replication to a grinding halt, for example.
Futon will throw an error if you try to display the document and you won't get to delete it.
Assuming you know the ID here is an example of how to delete the document:
curl http://localhost:5984/mydbname/_all_docs | grep MYDOCID
_all_docs will not try to get the corrupted content of the document but just its meta data,
that's why no error about invalid json is thrown in this case.
The resulting line will give you the latest revision ID that you need to delete the document.
curl -X DELETE http://localhost:5984/mydbname/MYDOCID?rev=MYREVID --user user:pass
See also:
http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2391
