I have been on the think track of not using SQL for sometime now and have completely come to the conclusion that it is entirely possible. Possible in the sense that a decent well founded ODBMS will suit my need.
The project I am embarking on does not have the funds to splash around and this puts it squarley into the hands of OSS for the chosen ODBMS. If you look around, it leaves only a few choices. After you weed the crappy and incompatible ones out, the clear winner is db4objects.
http://rbtech.blogspot.com/2007/05/desire-vs-need-odbms-vs-rdbms.html