royans

I had the opportunity to listen to Tony Tam at MongoSF talking about why and how they moved Wordnik from Mysql to MongoDB.  Both the Slides and the Video of the talk are attached to the end of this post. Wordnik is a new kind of “word” repository which is much more “current” than traditional dictionaries. In addition to showing words which have not yet reached mainstream, they give tons of other related information and statistics about any given word. They had started looking for alternatives to Mysql after they hit 4billion rows in MyISAM and started noticing locks on tables exceeding 10s of seconds during inserts. They wanted to insert 1500 “values” per second and fell short of it even with elaborate workarounds. The core requirement for a replacement was very simple. The datastore they were about to replace was RO-centric at the rate of 10000 reads for every write, they had almost no application logic in database (no stored procedures), there were no PrivateKey/