[coffeemug]

I'm the founder @ Rethink. Just to clarify, we don't see approachability and scalability as a dichotomy, we think one could do both really well. There are of course some tradeoffs involved (which is why the [awesome] team @ Basho chose a dynamo-style system and we chose a master-slave type system), but in the grand scheme of things, high scale and approachability are definitely possible and we (and possibly others) are going to make it happen.

[granitepail]

Yeah! Exactly! Sorry if it was unclear, but what I meant was that I saw the latest wave of DBs (Rethink + Riak) as finally letting the administration & scalability side catch up to the programmer approachability side. Anyone with significant experience knows sharding MongoDB can be a massive pain. Sharding Cassandra is easier, but it certainly lacks the juicy programmer interfaces provided by more modern solutions. I'm very excited about the work you guys are doing.