Alternatives to SQL Databases [LWN.net]
http://lwn.net/Articles/328487/

Traditional SQL databases with "ACID" properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) give strong guarantees about what happens when data is stored and retrieved. These guarantees make it easier for application developers, freeing them from thinking about exactly how the data is stored and indexed, or even which database is running. However, these guarantees come with a cost.

Cassandra is a hybrid non-relational database in the same class as Google's BigTable. It is more featureful than a key/value store like Dynomite, but supports fewer query types than a document store like MongoDB. Cassandra was started by Facebook and later transferred to the open-source community. It is an ideal runtime database for web-scale domains like social networks.

Over the past few years, relational databases have fallen out of favor for a number of influential people in our industry. I'd like to weigh in on that, but before doing so, I'd like to give my executive summary of the events leading up to this movement

Tokyo Cabinet

Обзор нескольких опенсурсных нереляционных БД.

Thoughts on NoSQL, Tokyo Cabinet, CouchDB, Redis, and Cassandra.

answer is 3TB database???

"The fundamental problem is endemic to the relational database mindset, which places the burden of computation on reads rather than writes."

Wow, cassandra uses a lot of disk space. Trade offs!

As a Web developer it's always a good idea to know what the current practices are in the industry even if they seem a bit too crazy to adopt…yet.

bit on why non-SQL dbs are used in social networking sites

Nice detailed examples on NoSQL data modeling in Cassandra.

"Most of today’s up and coming key-value stores are more than just simple key-value stores. You saw this when we looked at Tokyo Cabinet which, in addition to simple key-value capabilities, adds more sophisticated abilities, such as database-like tables. In this post we’ll look at Cassandra — a modern key-value store that continues this trend. Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook and released to open source last year. The Facebook team describes Cassandra as (Google) BigTable running on top of an Amazon Dynamo-like infrastructure."

Most of today's and up and coming key-value stores are more than just simple key-value stores. Cassandra is a modern key-value store that continues this trend.

Good introduction to the "NoSQL" space (initially not a fan of the term, but I guess it is going to stick...), highlighting the different designs used by the options in the space, and the benefits/drawbacks of those designs.

Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as “NoSQL databases.”

RT @kvz: Why Twitter is dropping MySQL in favor of Cassandra: http://bit.ly/dyeiXF

RT @DZone "Cassandra @ Twitter: An Interview with Ryan King « MyNoSQL" http://dzone.com/WbTY

MyNoSQL: Please include anything I’ve missed.

une base données massivement parallèle et avec l'esprit "bigtable", provient de facebook

The Apache Cassandra Project develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database, bringing together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model.

# # Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database. To scale at Digg they followed a set of practices very similar to those used at eBay. No joins, no foreign key constraints (to scale writes), primary key look-ups only, limited range queries, and joins were done in memory. When implementing the comment feature a 4,000 percent increase in performance was created by sorting in PHP instead of MySQL. All this effort required to make a relational database scale basically meant you were using a non-relational database anyway. So why not just use a non-relational database from the start?

As Digg started out with a MySQL oriented architecture and has recently been moving full speed to Cassandra, his observations on some of their lessons learned and the motivation for the move are especially valuable. Here are some of the key takeaways you find useful:

RT @Sebdz: RT: @programmateur: Digg: 4000 % performance increase by sorting in PHP rather than MySQL (via @mrboo) - http://bit.ly/ckma10

♻ @n1k0: "Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database" http://n1k.li/4v (via @nsilberman)

Typically for relatively static data sets, relatively low query volumes, and relatively high latency requirements.

Introductory blog post about the Cassandra data model.

HBase vs Cassandra: why we moved

Maybe I should learn to use Cassandra someday.

A discussion of the different NoSQL-style datastores in use at Twitter, including Hadoop (with Pig for analysis), HBase,

Twitters NoSQL slides

A discussion of the different NoSQL-style datastores in use at Twitter, including Hadoop (with Pig for analysis), HBase, Cassandra, and FlockDB.

cassandra,thrift, hdfs, hbase, scribe,pig,lzo, flockdb

interesting presentation on #NoSQL at #twitter by @kevinweil http://bit.ly/99h8BK [from http://twitter.com/behi_at/statuses/13587582774]