While it's important to try to squeeze out as much performance out of a single box as possible, it seems to me that the future lies in scaling horizontally by adding more servers.
CouchDB is an obvious contender here, but as far as i know they still don't have partition of data across multiple servers (yet.., i saw a GSoC project about it).
ScimoreDB is also interesting (disclaimer; i know them personally); a full RDBMS with ACID properties and all that jazz that can partition data over a set of servers. (www.scimore.com if you are interrested)
I'm a bit tired of using SQL/Tables/Columns for storage; the perfect solution for me is CouchDB w/ partitioning where you "just add more servers". It would be cool to get to the point where we can eliminate memcached and the likes from our infrastructure because the database itself scales just as well.
CouchDB is an obvious contender here, but as far as i know they still don't have partition of data across multiple servers (yet.., i saw a GSoC project about it).
ScimoreDB is also interesting (disclaimer; i know them personally); a full RDBMS with ACID properties and all that jazz that can partition data over a set of servers. (www.scimore.com if you are interrested)
I'm a bit tired of using SQL/Tables/Columns for storage; the perfect solution for me is CouchDB w/ partitioning where you "just add more servers". It would be cool to get to the point where we can eliminate memcached and the likes from our infrastructure because the database itself scales just as well.
just some random thoughts.