I wouldn't be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They just made the wrong choices--Riak is fantastic. Having said that, it's incredibly easy t

I wouldn't be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They just made the wrong choices--Riak is fantastic. Having said that, it's incredibly easy to make the wrong choices right now: 1. The "NoSQL" field is generally immature and filled with land mines, so a random selection favors a bad outcome 2. The mass-appeal rank ordered reputation of these projects is not in line with their actual quality/robustness, especially when it comes to very high-demand situations (node counts are high enough to render node failures common, write loads are heavy, machines are within 50% of their I/O limit). So, I wouldn't let these reports discourage one too much about the possibilities of NoSQL, especially the scaling possibilities of fully distributed databases. It really can be a game changer with a solid implementation. Riak is one. (Note: "wrong decision" is not meant to be judgmental, we (bu.mp) are ourselves just recovering from a similar "wrong decision"... VERY similar. :-) Agree completely re: bare metal. If you have scaling problems you should have a very good reason not to be doing dedicated hosting on bare metal IME.