Symphony.

I'm currently very interested in Neo4j - an open source disk-based graph database. Advantages over relational databases such as MySQL include potentially massive performance increases, flexible graph structures rather than table/lookup-based ones, and a very cool-looking web-based admin tool (which reminds me of a certain CMS I once saw...). It's also fully transactional, so it should be good at ensuring data integrity.

Ruby on Rails users can already use it, and I thought that maybe it's something that would be great for a lot of Symphony CMS sites. Different Symphony sites have greatly-varying data structures and relationships, and being able to use a graph structure rather than having to worry about implications of tons of lookups seems to me like it would be fantastic. It has a REST API, which I suppose could well help with initial integration?

I'm more of an HTML/CSS (+XSLT at some stage, hopefully!) person than a coder, so would be interested to hear developers' thoughts on this.

The web admin

Videos

Getting Started with Neo4j

Neo4j and real world scenarios

Introduction to Graph Databases

I was about to say 'over my head' but on closer inspection it looks promising. I'm not sure if anyone can add any weight to their claim:

For many applications, Neo4j offers performance improvements on the order of 1000x or more compared to relational DBs.