There are several different NoSQLs. For example, currently MongoDB is a good choice if you're looking for indices, ad-hoc queries and want to get up and runnin

There are several different NoSQLs. For example, currently MongoDB is a good choice if you're looking for indices, ad-hoc queries and want to get up and running quickly on eg. a web project. Interestingly, with indices and ad-hoc queries, MongoDB becomes a lot like Mysql, only you're writing weird And() and Or() functions instead of "SELECT ... WHERE AND ... OR". Also, indices are tied to the documents themselves, so it's not clear how that scales. Shameless plug: Or you could go more bleeding-edge and check out ScalienDB, which is a straight key-value store built on Paxos and sharding. Nevertheless, getting started is easy: https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb/wiki I wrote ScalienDB. The plan going forward is to add a data model and distributed transactions and in general become a low level data layer substrate similar to how Google uses its databases.