Almost every web developer has a favorite database that he/she feels comfortable working with as all the tricks & gimmicks are already experienced.
It can be one of the popular databases below:
or even simpler ones like XML, text, etc.
It is understandable why these databases are frequently used; they are well-documented, have a community behind them, integrated with most popular CMSs', easy-to-use, offered by most of the hosting companies ,etc..
But there are also many other databases which are getting popular day-by-day & may have advantages over what you're already using.
Here are 25+ open source alternative databases that you may consider using in your next project:

It is an open source, high-performance, scalable, schema-free & document-oriented (JSON-like data schemas) database.
There are ready to use drivers for most popular programming languages like PHP,Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, C++ + more.

Hypertable is a high performance distributed data storage system designed to support applications requiring maximum performance, scalability, and reliability.
It is modeled after Google's BigTable and mostly focuses on large-scale datasets.

A document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript.
CouchDB offers a RESTful JSON API which can be accessed from any environment allowing HTTP requests
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