I forgot to mention that I had my first introduction to Raven DB last week when Oren gave a talk in Melbourne. I've been so used to strict schema defined databases for my whole life that I find the these document databases with dynamic indexes sort of ... errr ... alien and rubbery. I'm still puzzling over when and how I can use Raven DB.
And related to that, I was amazed to see that Raven DB has an option to use ESE ISAM <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine> databases as the backing storage. Quite a clever idea actually, as ESE databases are crash hardened, gigantically scalable and have blazing performance. So piggy-backing on ESE is a great idea. I'm using ESE in a production app at the moment thanks to ManagedEsent <http://managedesent.codeplex.com/> . I'm working on some utilities and T4 templates to help .NET developers use ESE databases with great ease. I will have some questions about technical matters and guidance on this matter over the coming weeks, so watch out. It's good to have so many free choices for reliable data storage. Greg
