CouchDB: No Couch Potato

With the recent launch of Amazon's SimpleDb and Google's BigTable paper, it seems there has been a wave of interest in "new" database systems such as Damien Katz's CouchDB.

These database systems concentrate on being scalable, distributed and high-performance, as well has having extremely flexible data structures.

Being scalable, distributed and high-performance is great, but I am particularly excited by the prospect of having flexible data models. No more painful schema changes: instead, we can store anything and everything, and decide how to process it later.

At the time of writing, CouchDB is not ready for production use, but hopefully in time this will be a centrepiece in every Web developer's arsenal.

I had a play with Ajatus, a CouchDB-based CRM product. It doesn't look quite ready for production use but it is impressive nonetheless.

Is this the end of ORMs as we know them?