Document databases are quite a hot topic at the moment, what with the release of RavenDB and continued presence and interest surrounding MongoDB and CouchDB. However, I've pretty much settled on MongoDB as my document database of choice, despite the promise (and actual goodness) of RavenDB.

This post was inspired and prompted by Howard Van Rooijen's recent post regarding his view on the document database space, and I thought I'd throw up a quick post of my own with my take. Essentially I agree with Howard's assessment. CouchDB is nice, but in my view is outshone by MongoDB which just makes the whole process easier and more friendly.

I've played around with RavenDB which I really like and originally this was well poised to take the spot of 'my favourite document database for .NET', but I just can't get my head around the licencing. As many others have already said, Ayende definitely deserves to get paid for his hard work but the current licencing arrangements puts it out of reach for me unless I end up working on an open-source project. Nevertheless, I wish him all the best with RavenDB and hope it is successful.

I've put together a little 'interest graph' like Howard's to show just how similar my experience with them has been (click for larger).

It should be noted that my interest represents not my opinion of each database, rather the chance that I will continue to use it and look to it as a potential solution in the future.

I wonder whether others' experiences follow a similar pattern?