[rit]

Sure, if the querying is your only concern.

The trade off you make to get the performance attributes, scalability, schemaless flexibility, etc from a NoSQL storage solution is that you end up in a different query situation. Things like joins aren't as easy - but at the same time the cost of doing what in RDBMS land you'd consider "Denormalizing" (potentially duplicating data as needed) is much, much lower.

As for translation, the Mongo guys have produced a JDBC driver (for those of you stuck in java land, but at the least it's a code model for "Howto"; disclaimer: I haven't had a chance to use it yet) that supports some automatic translation of SQL statements to Mongo queries - http://github.com/erh/mongo-jdbc