CouchDB is one of the most interesting projects right now (in my opinion). Right now, it simply doesn't offer a huge number of advantages for my work (web development), but I'm hoping that it will in the future.<p>Specifically, I think that it has the potential for really good asynchronous replication and sharding. Those two things are just a pain right now - especially sharding. But it isn't hard to imagine CouchDB altered slightly so that you could have a cluster of shards that asynchronously fed a view.