James Golick makes a point which lot of people miss. He doesn’t believe auto-sharding features NoSQL provides is ready for full auto-pilot yet, and that good developers have to think about sharding as part of design architecture, regardless of what datastore you pick. If you take at face value the marketing materials of many NoSQL [...]

I was at the MongoSF conference few weeks ago, and 10gen just hosted one at NY as well.I was taken aback by the simplicity and the hope MongoDB provides. I’ll have a more detailed post about what I think about it in a few days, but until then chew on these slides from bit.ly who [...]

Few weeks ago while I was mulling over what kind of service registry/discovery system to use for a scalable application deployment platform, I realized that for mid-size organizations with complex set of services, building one from scratch may be the only option. I also found out that many AWS/EC2 customers have already been using S3 [...]

Syslog is a commonly used transport mechanism for system logs. But people sometimes forget it could be used for a lot of other purposes as well. Take, for example, the interesting challenge of aggregating web server logs from 100 different servers into one server and then figuring out how to merge them. If you have [...]

Cassandra is the only NOSQL datastore I’m aware of, which is scalable, distributed, self replicating, eventually consistent, schema-less key-value store running on java which doesn’t have a single point of failure. HBase could also match most of these requirements, but Cassandra is easier to manage due to its tiny footprint. The one thing Cassandra doesn’t [...]