If you forget about the iOS SDK for a minute, Parse is essentially a modern CouchDB. Couch got a lot of things right, and with the advent of client-side apps I

If you forget about the iOS SDK for a minute, Parse is essentially a modern CouchDB. Couch got a lot of things right, and with the advent of client-side apps I'm guessing the idea of database-as-API makes a ton more sense to people now than it did five years ago. But because CouchDB wasn't made with modern web app development in mind, it has these awkward almost-right-but-not-quite features, like the way it handles push notifications (see http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/notifications.html http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/notifications.html), design documents, couch apps, map/reduce and so on. All of that stuff is great, but none of it works quite as smoothly as it should. Anyway, I would love a database with these features: * RESTful, with basic filtering operations built-in * schemaless * uses webhooks to provide push notifications, plugins (e.g. ACL, validation) and map-reduce -- meaning you can "program" your database using any language you want, couple events to background jobs etc. * websocket support * multiple engines so you can back a collection with Mongo, Redis, Neo4j, S3 (store/serve media) or anything else depending on your requirements, but still have all collections exposed to the web as JSON with a uniform querying interface * smart view caching The trouble with Couch is that you're supposed to be able to build apps that are backed with just your database and nothing else, but it never ends up being quite flexible enough to do exactly that. But a database that would allow you to replace your entire back-end framework with just a couple of independent snippets of code to handle validation, authorization, sending email and what-not but with all the CRUD you need for an API-driven app out of the box... hells yeah.