ReadWriteWeb has a well-written article on the new contender to challenge the long-standing dominance of the Relational database. As an old-school database developer from back in the day, I've seen a lot of reports about the death of the relational model.
"Relational databases have been around for over 30 years. During this time, several so-called revolutions flared up briefly, all of which were supposed to spell the end of the relational database. All of those revolutions fizzled out, of course, and none even made a dent in the dominance of relational databases."
But with the rising trend of cloud computing, Key/Value databases that thrive in the cloud are gaining ground. Though unlikely to unseat the RDBMS, key/value databases have some definite strengths.
The article analyzes some popular cloud-service contenders: SimpleDB, Google AppEngine Datastore, and SQL Data Services, as well as some non-cloud contenders such as CouchDB, Project Voldemort, Mongo, and Drizzle.
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