I too am a huge fan of SQL, what mysql and postgres has given to the world and how it has inspired and set seeds in many of us to use open source, contribute to open source.

I am dipping my toes into couchdb, just to see what all the noise is about.

Still getting my head around map,reduce and the fact im writing in javascript. All that aside the biggest exciting factor for me.

It is so much easier to write custom functions for it than SQL. ( Mysql, and yes I only tried via phpmyadmin )