The next Reading Geek Night is on Tuesday 9th March and is already shaping up to be an interesting evening. The first talk to announce is from Alan Bradburne. Apart from being a #RdgGeek regular, Alan is a freelance web developer, author of 'Rails Social Networking Sites' from Apress and developer of furnish.co.uk. (You can find him at @alanb, photoblog at http://alanb.me).

On the 9th he'll be looking at alternatives to conventional databases. In his own words...

Relational databases and SQL have served us well the last 40 years or so, but recently a new breed of data stores have started to gain in popularity. These schema-less, SQL-less, non-relational databases are powering sites such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and soon, Twitter. What are they, what are they good for and how can you get started using them?

It's going to be a great night - and I'm looking forward to seeing new and old faces from 7.30pm (ish) downstairs at Copa.