Another day, another hazy outlook for the future of NoSQL databases. The positive news is that Membase (formerly NorthScale) has publicly released its memcached-based Membase Server database, which seems to have caught on with a number of impressive customers. Its relative success not only suggests that the technology is good, but also that there’s something to developing open source software in-house versus relying on the Apache community for development. The negative news is that Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger has joined the Clustrix advisory board. Clustrix is another Big Data startup, although its proprietary solution retains a SQL foundation. To the extent their uses overlap, scalable SQL products could prove easier to sell than NoSQL products.