11 articles in this selection

2010/07/01

Ken North, writing in Dr. Dobb's Journal, gives a nice overview of the long and storied history of SQL. The piece helps one understand the wave of mergers among the big database vendors, and make sense of current trends in database and database-like software. And I'd like to offer my opinion about where SQL and database management systems are headed....

2010/03/04

Todd Hoff put up a provocative post on High Scalability called MySQL and Memcached: End of an Era?In addition, he provides a lot of useful links, that DBMS-oriented folks such as myself might have previously overlooked.

2009/11/10

Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as NoSQL databases. There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Digg's (3 TB for green badges) or Facebook's (50 TB for inbox search) or eBay's (2 PB overall); per-server performance; and rigid schema design...

2009/07/29

Mongo (from "humongous") is a high-performance, open source, schema-free document-oriented database. A key goal of MongoDB is to bridge the gap between key/value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which are deep in functionality)....

2009/07/27

With the rise of Social Media and the decreasing cost of storage, very small companies have a need for processing massive quantities of data. Furthermore, it's easier than ever to write software to generate/output/process data, thanks to languages like Ruby, frameworks like Spring, and scalability best practices. A few days' work and a handful of engineers can net you a bare-bones Twitter clone, or a crawler to get the link graph of the entire Internet. This data growth can be far from linear. You simply can't analyze this much data in an RDBMS - but these small startups can't spend millions on DWs, either. Since the analysis is a core of the business, internal hacked-together tools cobbled together from SQL boxes often emerged. What results is a temporary solution, not a platform. With Hadoop, HBase, and Hive, there’s now a free, scalable Data Warehousing platform that makes it possible to migrate a considerable portion of DW analytics....

2009/07/15

Cassandra is a hybrid non-relational database in the same class as Google's BigTable. It is more featureful than a key/value store like Dynomite, but supports fewer query types than a document store like MongoDB. Cassandra was started by Facebook and later transferred to the open-source community. It is an ideal runtime database for web-scale domains like social networks. This post is both a tutorial and a "getting started" overview. You will learn about Cassandra's features, data model, API, and operational requirements - everything you need to know to deploy a Cassandra-backed service....

2009/07/15

Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store. Cassandra brings together the distributed systems technologies from Dynamo and the data model from Google's BigTable. Like Dynamo, Cassandra is eventually consistent. Like BigTable, Cassandra provides a ColumnFamily-based data model richer than typical key/value systems....

2009/07/03

The relatively young but rapidly growing 'nosql' community met last Thursday in San Francisco. The idea was to give attendees a solid introduction to how distributed, non relational databases work as well as an overview of the various projects out there....

2009/07/03

Slashdot article on the NoSQL meeting, some interesting comments.

2009/07/03

The meet-up in San Francisco last month had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party. The inaugural get-together of the burgeoning NoSQL community crammed 150 attendees into a meeting room at CBS Interactive....

2009/07/03

Eric Lai emailed today to ask what I thought about the NoSQL folks, and especially whether I thought their ideas were useful for enterprises in general, as opposed to just Web 2.0 companies. That was the first I heard of NoSQL, which seems to be a community discussing SQL alternatives popular among the cloud/big-web-company set, such as BigTable, Hadoop, Cassandra and so on....