> I'm actually surprised there not more "database as a library"-projects out there. For distributed systems, you tend to need quite a bit of configuration (how

> I'm actually surprised there not more "database as a library"-projects out there. For distributed systems, you tend to need quite a bit of configuration (how to find the peers, authentication, things like namespaces). And then if the communication is TCP-based, you tend to keep connections open to avoid the handshake latency when you need to retrieve a value. Which sounds like something you typically don't want running inside a library, but rather as a separate process. And then you've basically arrived at the memcached design.