Gareth Powell, founder and architect at Ziniki Infrastructure Systems, discusses the integration of Couchbase in their middleware tier, highlighting its document storage and incremental mapreduce capabilities for querying data. Despite his SQL and MongoDB background, Powell faced initial challenges due to Couchbase's lack of similar "find" functionality and its reliance on asynchronous, eventually consistent views. He describes his project, which involves a data definition layer using XML, and the choice of globally unique keys (UUIDs) for document storage. Powell found that Couchbase's views, while powerful for indexing, presented issues with eventual consistency, particularly during automated testing scenarios involving user credentials, generated artifacts, and nested documents. To address these challenges, he initially duplicated index work in real-time using the key/value store but later adopted the "lookup" pattern for unique keys and direct key/value store access for nested objects. He emphasizes the importance of choosing the right Couchbase access mechanism based on application needs, advocating for understanding infrastructure software's scalability requirements and avoiding over-reliance on views for data access.