So there’s a bit of a swelling around the idea of NoSQL. That is, databases that don’t have an SQL interface in front of them – with the promise of better performance. With a well designed backend, this is no doubt the case.

A flexible query language is rather useful though. I think we’ll see the rise of AlsoSQL. That is systems that present a fast and simple protocol along with a SQL interface.

This hybrid system has seen use for many years. MySQL Cluster is one such example. SQL through MySQL Server, NoSQL through NDB API.

With Drizzle, I feel we’ll be in a pretty good position to offer non-sql based protocols and access methods to existing storage engines.

I’m hearing a lot of “NoSQL” these days. To really understand how (and) does it works, I decided to give a try on MongoDB. MongoDB (hu*mongo*us) is an open source, scalable, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database written in the C++ programming language. MongoDB is not a Relational Database Management System. The database manages collections of JSON […]

You have to love all the debating going on over NOSQL -vs- SQL don’t you? With my UC session on choosing the right data storage tools ( does this sound better then SQL-vs-NoSQL?) I have been trying to stay current with the mood of the community so i can make my talk more relevant. Today I was catching up on reading a few blogs posts and I thought I would pass along these two: Pro SQL and Pro NoSQL … these represent the two very different views on this subject. (Note I think there are misleading facts and figures in these that should be flushed out more, but they are a good sample of what I am talking about). …

I am giving a talk in a couple of weeks at the 2010 MySQL User Conference that will touch on use cases for NOSQL tools -vs- More relational tools, the talk is entitled “Choosing the Right Tools for the Job, SQL or NOSQL”. While this talk is NOT supposed to be a deep dive into the good, bad, and ugly of these solutions, rather a way to discuss potential use cases for various solutions and where they may make a lot of sense, being me I still felt a need to at least do some minor benchmarking of these solutions. The series of posts I wrote last year over on mysqlperformanceblog.com comparing Tokyo Tyrant to both MySQL and Memcached was fairly popular. In fact the initial set of benchmark scripts I used for that series actually has been put to good use since then testing out …

Most software people are aware of the ACID acronym coined by Jim Gray. With the growth of the web and open source, the scaling and complexity constraints imposed on DBMS implementations supporting ACID are more visible, and new (or at least new terms for known) compromises and tradeoffs are being discussed widely. The better known NoSQL systems are giving insight by example into particular choices of tradeoffs.

Working at MySQL, I have often been surprised at the variety of potential alternatives when implementing a DBMS, and the number of applications which don't need the full set of ACID letters in the strictest form. The original MySQL storage engine, MyISAM is one of the first and most successful examples of an 'ACID remix'. The people …

In the past few months, I have tested many NoSQL solutions. Redis, MongoDB, HBase yet Cassandra is the Column Store DB I picked because of its speed (on writes), reliability, built in feature set that makes it multi-datacenter aware. The one other personal reward for Cassandra is it is written in Java. I like reading and writing in Java more than C++ although it really does not matter for me personally in the end.

Let us talk about the reason why I am introducing Cassandra into my infrastructure and some of its drawbacks I have noticed so far.

Why it is being introduced:
We have a feature where we record every single click for 50 million Monthly Active Users (real-time) and storing this in mySQL is just waste of semi-good hardware for data that is only looked at for the past 24 hours. Over the course of some time (couple of months) more than 3 billion rows accumulated, which translated into a 3.5 TB distributed …

I recently had a long conversation with Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about location, geodata, and the NoSQL movement. Stump, who was formerly lead architect at Digg, had a lot to say. Highlights are posted below. You can find a transcript of the full interview here.

Competition in the geodata industry:

I personally haven't seen anybody that has come out and said, "We're actively indexing millions of points of data. We're also offering storage and we're giving tools to leverage that. I've seen a lot of fragmentation." Where SimpleGeo fits is, I really think, at the crossroads or the nexus of a lot of people that are trying to figure out this space. So …

Its been a while anyone talked about Intel’s Hyper-Threading performance when it comes to databases. There were enough posts about disabling Hyper-Threading  completely when it comes to MySQL/InnoDB workloads way back when we had enough issues with scalability of InnoDB on multi-core systems. But things has changed quite a bit in the fast year or [...]

1. Common MySQL Queries -- a useful reference.
2. MySociety's Next 12 Months -- two new projects, FixMyTransport and "Project Fosbury". The latter is a more general tool to help people organise their own campaigns for change.
3. riak -- scalable key-value store with JSON interface. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. Notes from NoSQL Live Boston -- full of juicy nuggets of info from the NoSQL conference.

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This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!

This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.

This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. …