Persistence Smoothie: Blending NoSQL and SQL – see user feedback and comments at http://joind.in/talk/view/1332.

Michael Bleigh from Intridea, high-end Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultants, build apps from start to finish, making it scalable. He’s written a lot of stuff, available at http://github.com/intridea. @mbleigh on twitter

NoSQL is a new way to think about persistence. Most NoSQL systems are not ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Generally, most NoSQL systems have:

• Denormalization
  
• Eventual Consistency
  
• Schema-Free
  
• Horizontal Scale
  

NoSQL tries to scale (more) simply, it is starting to go mainstream – NY …

It seems that a lot of people equate non-SQL databases with non-relational-ness, or malign the word relational. This is pretty much pure ignorance. If you’ve ever uttered a sentence that includes the phrase “…non-relational database…” then I have two suggestions for you.

1. Study relational algebra. At a bare minimum, read the Wikipedia article on relational algebra. There is much more you could do — take a class on the topic, or read C.J. Date’s SQL and Relational Theory (my review). Ask yourself how similar SQL is to the relational algebra. How is relational algebra different …

The NoSQL/relational database debate has been going on for quite some time. MariaDB, like MySQL is relational. And if you read these series of blog posts, you’ll realise that if you use MySQL correctly, you can achieve quite a lot.

1. It all starts with Kellan Elliott-McCrea with his introductory post on Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr. Follow the entire series.
2. He starts of the series with Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on …

(originally posted at the Gear6 corporate blog: MySQL+Memcached is still the workhorse.  Please comment there.)

Because I'm becoming known as someone who knows something about "this whole NoSQL thing", people have started asking me to take a look at some of their systems or ideas, and tell them which NoSQL technology they should use.

To be fair, it is a confusing space right now, there are a LOT of NoSQL technologies showing up, and there is a lot of buzz from the tech press, and in blogs and on twitter.  Most of that buzz is, frankly, ignorant and uninformed, and is being written by people who do not have enough experience running live systems.

A couple of times already, someone has described an application or concept to me, and asked "So, should I use Cassandra, or CouchDB, or what?"

And I look …

Novell’s Q1. The future of OpenSolaris. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca

“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell reported Linux platform revenue of $37.5m in Q1, up 6.4%.

# Internet.com reported that Novell’s Linux business broke even as Microsoft deal revenues fade.

# As the H reported Oracle exec Dan Roberts confirmed that OpenSolaris has a future at Oracle.

# Citrix acquired Paglo, launched GoToManage service.

# StatusNet …

Topics for this podcast:

*Jacobsen v. Katzer and open source impact
*Intel, Nokia team up for MeeGo open source OS
*Open source continues in embedded space
*MongoDB and the advent of the NoSQL databases
*Copyrights, complexities, control and conflict

iTunes or direct download (21:48, 6.07 MB)

Licensing, community, funding, revenue, business models, patents. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The OpenOffice.org Community announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3.2.

# An interview with Michael Tiemann on licensing and community.

# DotNetNuke raised $8m series B funding.

# Microsoft updated its Linux Integrated Components, introducing support for RHEL in Hyper-V.

# An interview with Marten Mickos on …

Fosdem 2010 was my 10th fosdem Edition (including the first OSDEM)
As every year Fosdem suffered even more from it's own success.

On Friday evening ther was the obligatory Beer event... however as people need to eat to .. the Devops crowd fled the scene

I had made reservations for a 20 something group and with the CentOS crowd joining us (as there was some overlap anyhow) we were 25 when we arrived in the restaurant .

Dinner and Discussions were great .. I learned about some new projects and we had some insightfull dicussions on how fat your thin foil should be ...

After dinner we went back to the Beer Event were lots of Free Beer was tasted ...

Saturday was the first full day of Fosdem, as usual Fosdem was the victim of it's own success , too much interresting stuff to see .. too little time.

Lots of Devrooms had the "FULL" sign put up more than you want as a visitor ...
I …

Image by Aranda\Lasch via Flickr

One of my favorite terms at the moment is “Big Data”.  While all terms are by nature subjective, in this post I will try and explain what Big Data means to me.

So what is Big Data?Big Data is the “modern scale” at which we are defining or data usage challenges.  Big Data begins at the point where need to seriously start thinking about the technologies used to drive our information needs.

While Big Data as a term seems to refer to volume this isn’t the case.  Many existing technologies have little problem physically handling large volumes (TB or PB) of data.  Instead the Big Data challenges result out of the combination of volume and our usage demands from that data.  And those …

Machines Plus Minds: E-Blobs and NoSQL options