Logstash - open source log management. Overview - elasticsearch. MongoDb Architecture. NOSQL has become a very heated topic for large web-scale deployment where scalability and semi-structured data driven the DB requirement towards NOSQL.
There has been many NOSQL products evolving in over last couple years. In my past blogs, I have been covering the underlying distributed system theory of NOSQL, as well as some specific products such as CouchDB and Cassandra/HBase. Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak vs HBase comparison. (Yes it's a long title, since people kept asking me to write about this and that too :) I do when it has a point.)
While SQL databases are insanely useful tools, their monopoly in the last decades is coming to an end. And it's just time: I can't even count the things that were forced into relational databases, but never really fitted them. (That being said, relational databases will always be the best for the stuff that has relations.) But, the differences between NoSQL databases are much bigger than ever was between one SQL database and another. This means that it is a bigger responsibility on software architects to choose the appropriate one for a project right at the beginning.