FWIW, those documents are a fantastic start and contain the sort of things that I wish I had known about MongoDB and Riak before embarking on quests to use them

FWIW, those documents are a fantastic start and contain the sort of things that I wish I had known about MongoDB and Riak before embarking on quests to use them. I hope you do well -- the world really needs a good amalgamation of strong data integrity (ACID, transactions) and the ease-of-life that distributed databases generally give you. Since I don't work in an industry where I need microsecond reads, I'm perfectly happy to pay the cost of "it might take 10s of milliseconds to commit this" if I can avoid having to go down the "okay, now I have to shard my project" path for an eighth time. :-)