There’s been a bit of a buzz on the intertubes today about YapDatabase as a potential competitor to Core Data. While I don’t think that’s necessarily the case (there aren’t modelling tools and migrations at this stage), it looks like an interesting project.
@k7d pointed out on Twitter that Tokyo Kit is a much faster alternative (which is based on Tokyo Cabinet a NoSQL storage engine).
I’m happy to wait another 3 weeks and see what Apple has been working on this past year.