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 …

Key-value databases are catching fire these days. Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Keyspace, Tokyo Tyrant, and a handful of others are surging in popularity, judging by the contents of my feed reader.

I find a number of things interesting about these tools.

• There are many more of them than open-source traditional relational databases. (edit: I mean that there are many options that all seem similar to each other, instead of 3 or 4 standing out as the giants.)
• It seems that a lot of people are simultaneously inventing solutions to their problems in private without being aware of each other, then open-sourcing the results. That points to a sudden sea change in architectures. Tipping points tend to be abrupt, which would explain isolated redundant development.
• Many of the products are feature-rich with things programmers need: diverse language bindings, APIs, embeddability, and the ability to speak familiar …

I decided to thee other day to investigate using Tokyo Tyrant because I was interested in the fact it has a memcached protocol and I wanted to get a feel for how it works with my memcached functions for MySQL (UDF). Matt Ingenthron came up with a good term recently: Mem-capable, which Tokyo Tyrant is. I find any key/value storage to be of great interest, particularly those that you simply change the port your memcached client is connecting and simply use it the same way you would memcached.

So, just what is Tokyo Tyrant?

Tokyo Tyrant is a database server, written by Mikio Hirabayashi, for Tokyo Cabinet. It provides for concurrent remote connections to Tokyo Cabinet . It provides its own binary protocol as well as a memcached and HTTP compatibility protocols. It also has C, Perl, PHP, Java, Erlang, Python and Ruby bindings. Other features Tokyo Tyrant offers:

* Hot backup and update log
* Async …

A document oriented database or data store does not use tables for storing data. It stores each record as a document with certain characteristics. So a multiple documents in this type of store can have different characteristics - which means different number of fields per record and different fields per row. The benefit would be that if you are using a document oriented database for storing a

Last weekend, my brother and I attended SELF 2009. A few thoughts on it:

The mixture of sessions was interesting. There were some really good ones. I think the best session I attended was an OpenSolaris/NetBeans/Glassfish/Virtualbox/ZFS session, given by a Sun employee. He was an excellent presenter, and really showed off the strengths of the technologies in a nice way. He started up enough VMs to make his OpenSolaris laptop chew into swap, and I thought it was fun to see how it dealt with that. I’ve heard Solaris and OpenSolaris do a lot better at avoiding and managing swapping than GNU/Linux, but I couldn’t make any opinion from watching. I did think it was odd to have this session at a “Linux” (yes, they left off the GNU) conference. But I thought the session was a good addition to the conference. In other sessions, and in the hallways and expo, there was a lot more …

I read Tokyo Cabinet: Beyond Key-Value Store today from one of the news sites, and it reminded me of Brian’s hack on Tokyo Cabinet == Tokyo Engine. Looking at TokyoEngine in Brian’s Mercurial repository, there have been no updates in over a year. Is anyone planning on taking up development of this? Tokyo Cabinet looks really interesting, and Brian has already started the enabling of making it a MySQL engine.

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