Which key/value store is the most promising/stable?

Question

I\'m looking to start using a key/value store for some side projects (mostly as a learning experience), but so many have popped up in the recent past that I\'ve got no idea

Answer 1

At this year's PyCon, Jeremy Edberg of Reddit gave a talk:

http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/

He said that Reddit uses PostGres as a key-value store, presumably with a simple 2-column table; according to his talk it had benchmarked faster than any other key-value store they had tried. And, of course, it's very mature.

Ultimately, OverClocked is right; your use case determines the best store. But RDMBSs have long been (ab)used as key-value stores, and they can be very fast, too.