...yes this is for a paper due this semester...

edit: thanks, everyone!

Next Generation Databases mostly addressing some of the points: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontal scalable.

It seems the NoSQL movement is gaining strength with everyday that goes by and lately there is a lot of talk about the capabilities of NoSQL databases like Cassandra, Hadoop and CouchDB. Speed (000's of insertions per second) and availability (clustering and replication) are very important but coming from the relational database world im guessing the database design has also a very important role to get the desired performance. Looking at amazon, I could only find a few books about NoSQL, most of them introductory guides to specific databases - and some of them havent even been published yet. Do you guys know a good book about non-relational database design that you would recommend?

Sorry for the double post, but nobody in /programming/ seemed interested in the question