C5 is a simple, reliable, and scalable open source database which improves on HBase in every way. It is optimized for fast failover and can be used in production for both OLTP and analytics, eliminating a whole class of pipelines and bottlenecks. It is the first HBase successor, fully HBase API-compatible, developed from the ground up to run on the cloud installs with very easy to no maintenance and tuning. Failover happens instantly, which makes it a viable option for APIs, and all the data is accessible to Hadoop analytics flows right away. C5 takes full advantage of high speed IO (SSDs) and is simple to grow to hundreds and thousands of nodes as needed.
Haskell books will certainly not hurt. You won't need monads right away and you won't feel lacking certain Haskell powers if you don't read RWH right away, but in the long run, it will make F# more enjoyable. Of course OCaml books, ML books, and Clojure books will always help too, as will Scala ones.