Fad-Driven Development, I love it :) Sounds like a new O'Reilly book in progress. Well certainly the changing landscape of the Web has caused many to revisit t

Fad-Driven Development, I love it :) Sounds like a new O'Reilly book in progress. Well certainly the changing landscape of the Web has caused many to revisit the use of relational databases. There's considerable overlap with what app servers do, schemas are static beasts in general and often create application lock-in, bla, bla.. There is a fundamental tension in O-R mapping that I've concluded is best solved by dropping the R and using alternative persistence models. That said, relational databases are phenomenal and aren't going away anytime soon. I think CouchDB hits a sweet spot in a number of areas and is worth a very close look. It's still early and needs a lot of work but I think it's a keeper, especially given it's use of Erlang/OTP. Erlang is very mature and though it wasn't built with multi-cores in mind it's concurrency model is one of the few games around.