Engine Yard acquires Orchestra. Red Hat considers NoSQL move. And more.

# Engine Yard announced a definitive agreement to acquire Orchestra, bringing PHP expertise to the Engine Yard platform.

# Red Hat’s CEO indicated the company is interested in a NoSQL or Hadoop acquisition.

# Gluster announced Apache Hadoop compatibility in the next GlusterFS release.

# Microsoft signed an agreement with China Standard Software Co (CS2C) to …

InternetNews.com yesterday published an article based on an interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst asking the question “Is Red Hat Interested in the Database Market?”

In truth there was no real need to ask the question, as Whitehurst’s comments made it pretty clear that Red Hat is interested in the database market, and specifically the NoSQL database market.

“When I say I don’t want to be a database company, I’m saying that I don’t want to be a SQL database company,” Whitehurst said.

In case the implications of that statement were not entirely clear, he later added:

“But we would be very interested in a NoSQL type database or Hadoop type thing,” Whitehurst said. “Those are interesting as they represent net new.”

The article adds that Whitehurst would not …

Backing up databases has never been fun, not as fun as having a cool English Ale on the balcony on a hot summar day anyway, but MongoDB takes this one step further when it comes to annoyances.

In general, I often feel that many Open Source projects start with good intentions for what the project should do and how, but then more stuff is added as you require it, and suddenly what started out as a simple and fast application for a narrow usecase, suddenly turns into a bit of a mess. And the issue might well be that building fast, compact software for a specialized usecase, as they start out, is not the same as writing generic software, with a wide range of use cases, code that can easily be maintained and enhanced as we go along. And why should it not be like that? In many cases, this is just fine and the limited usecase is just what the project sets out to do, and it does it well. But sometimes this turns into something really …

I found myself reading NoSQL is a Premature Optimization a few minutes ago and threw up in my mouth a little. That article is so far off base that I’m not even sure where to start, so I guess I’ll go in order.

In fact, I would argue that starting with NoSQL because you think you might someday have enough traffic and scale to warrant it is a premature optimization, and as such, should be avoided by smaller and even medium sized organizations.  You will have plenty of time to switch to NoSQL as and if it becomes helpful.  Until that time, NoSQL is an expensive distraction you don’t need.

Uhm… WHAT?!

I’ve spent more than a few years using MySQL and have been using some NoSQL systems for the last year or so in a fairly busy environment. And scaling is only one of the considerations that factor into …

“Our experience from PNUTS also tells that these systems are hard to build: performance, but also scaleout, elasticity, failure handling, replication. You can’t afford to take any of these for granted when choosing a system. We wanted to find a way to call these out.” – Adam Silberstein and Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research. ___________________________________ A [...]

Another project, which has just started, is about providing PostgreSQL with Advanced Logical Replication using Tungsten replicator. As you probably know, recent versions of PostgreSQL can do physical replication, which has …

In the press in the last two days has been the reported outage of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in just one North Virginia data center. This has affected many large website includes FourSquare, Hootsuite, Reddit and Quora. A detailed list can be found at ec2disabled.com.

For these popular websites was this avoidable? Absolutely.

Basic scalability principles if deployed in these systems architecture would have averted the significant downtime regardless of your development stack. While I work primarily in MySQL these principles are not new, nor are they complicated, however they are fundamental concepts in scalability that apply to any technology including the …

VMware launches Cloud Foundry. Red Hat heads for Ceylon. And more.

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

# VMware launched Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-service and open source project.

# Red Hat’s Gavin King revealed details of the company’s Ceylon project.

# Red Hat submitted a number of specification requests for Java EE 7.

# Terracotta accused Red Hat of “trying to pull a fast …

I chatted today about VMware's Cloud Foundry with Roger Bodamer, the EVP of products and technology at 10Gen. 10Gen's MongoDB is one of three back-ends (along with MySQL and Redis) supported from the start by Cloud Foundry.

If I understand Cloud Foundry and VMware's declared "Open PaaS" strategy, it should fill a gap in services. Suppose you are a developer who wants to loosen the bonds between your programs and the hardware they run on, for the sake of flexibility, fast ramp-up, or cost savings. Your choices are:

An IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) product, which hands you an emulation of bare metal where you run an appliance (which you may need to build up yourself) combining an operating system, application, and related services such as DNS, firewall, and a …