Just curious, is there a good futures library for Node? If so, you could write code of the form:

    x = db.getFutureResult("x");
    y = db.getFutureResult("y");
    whenFuturesReady([x,y], callback(x, y) {
        useResults(x,y);
    });

This looks reasonably similar to typical synchronous code,

    x = db.getResult("x")
    y = db.getResult("y")
    useResults(x,y)

but it allows db queries to happen simultaneously and doesn't break the node paradigm.