· regarding Haskell and databases, the page http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools/Database_interfaces describes a few, but which are the ones that are stable and practical? Any user experiences?
During my experiments I found Takusen (http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen/) and HDBC (http://software.complete.org/hdbc) very useful, even if I liked Takusen interface more.
· regarding Haskell and serialization, I don't think that implementing Read/Show is a good way for real serialization, so what other options exist?
I could suggest Data.Binary (http://code.haskell.org/binary/), that is very well performing and supported. There are ways to generate instances of Binary automatically. I like the "Derive" approach most (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/darcs/derive/derive.htm), as it uses Template Haskell and does not require separate pre-processing.