I just listened to the latest episode of FLOSS Weekly; episode 36 on CouchDB. This episode is an interview with Jan Lehnardt about CouchBD.

Here's a description of what CouchDB is from their website:

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, but can be easily accessed from any environment that provides means to make HTTP requests. There are a multitude of third-party client libraries that make this even easier for a variety of programming languages and environments.

I haven't installed or tested it out, but it looks like a really cool idea for a small efficient database design. I always find it interesting to hear about some of these cool "new" projects that look at everyday problems in new and different ways.