 <p>I'm not sure if this is actually going to be a problem, but it's likely this could come up during replication.</p> <p>If you want to prevent it from coming up, you should look into the <a href="http://www.couchbase.org/sites/default/files/uploads/all/documentation/couchbase-api-db.html#couchbase-api-db_db-purge_post" rel="nofollow">/db/_purge</a> command. This command will remove references to deleted documents, and you can specify a single document ID to affect.</p>