It seems very similar to the time (a year or two ago) when every couple of weeks people got excited by a new cool wire-protocol (around the time of protocol buffers, thrift, etc.), but noone even mentioned ASN.1.
ASN.1 is hideously complex, part of the appeal of all those new wire protocols is simplicity.
SQLite is Berkeley DB's main competitor... it's actually funny that NoSQL on the server is all the rage, but SQL use is now really popular client side.
True, true and not really. It can be easily distributed - replication works great with them. Yes, it's not good for everything, but it's great for example for simple web api servers. Skip the connections if you don't really need it and write/read k-vs at a ridiculous speed locally.
> ASN.1 is hideously complex
Yeah... I guess this is more of a personal preference, but I never found it that bad. Write a wrapper that can (de)serialise your native objects once and you don't have the problem anymore.