Seven signs you need to accept NoSQL in your life according to the High Scalability blog. I especially like sign #6 “Maintaining a completely separate object caching system on top of an already beefy table storage system“. There are companies making serious bucks from selling exactly this type of caching systems. I find that a bit ironic, don’t you?
Twitter has just decided to adopt Cassandra as their main storage. I roughly estimated the status table to having more than 9 billion rows – it’s a good table size to start thinking about the benefits of NoSQL. I would have been interested in seeing a comparison with other existing solutions and a rationale of their choice. According to some sources, Ryan King rejected HBase because if a region server is down, writes will be blocked for affected data until the data is redistributed – unlike Cassandra’s “write never fail” policy. According to other sources, this will be solved in a future version of HBase but I think Twitter needed a solution sooner rather than later. I hope for two things:
- That the Twitter dudes will blog about their migration experience
- That I’ll be able to access and search through all my older tweets, fer’ God sake!
Forrester Research thinks that NoSQL and Elastic Caching Platforms are very similar. So similar that “NoSQL Wants To Be Elastic Caching When It Grows Up“. According to Forrester “Ultimately, the real difference between NoSQL and elastic caching now may be in-memory versus persistent storage on disk.” Yeah sure: transactions, durability, indexing, security model – who needs this crap anyway?
Oh and let’s not forget about today’s GAE unscheduled downtime. Waiting forward for the post mortem, for sure there will be a thing or two to learn…
Interesting observations. I also took aim at that Forrester turd at the link below, because it was just so misguided. I wonder which IMDG vendor paid for it.
http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2695#comment-155111
Jeff Darcy
25 Feb 10 at 4:33 pm