NoSQL with MySQL in Ruby - Friendly
http://friendlyorm.com/
James on Software | Introducing Friendly: NoSQL With MySQL in Ruby
http://jamesgolick.com/2009/12/16/introducing-friendly-nosql-with-mysql-in-ruby.html

I've been a big proponent of NoSQL for a while. I have played with just about all of the new generation of data stores. We almost got cassandra running in production once, and we've been running mongodb in production for about six months now. But, here's the thing: as awesome as these new dbs are, they're still young. Our app generates a ton of data and gets pretty serious traffic. So, we started hitting walls quickly. To make a long story short, we decided to fall back to MySQL. It's battle hardened. We know its production characteristics and limitations. Backups are a science. We know we can count on it. But, we have a lot of data, and adding fields and indexes was starting to get painful. Flexible schemas are one of the things that attracted me to NoSQL in the first place. Then, I remembered this article about How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. So, I decided to implement the system they describe in the article. Since we put Friendly in to production, we've seen

Friendly makes MySQL look like a document store. When you save an object, it seralizes all of its attributes to JSON and stores them in a single field. To query your data, Friendly creates and maintains indexes in separate tables. It even has write-through and read-through caching built right in.

Introducing Friendly: NoSQL With MySQL in Ruby Dec 16 2009 I've been a big proponent of NoSQL for a while. I have played with just about all of the new generation of data stores. We almost got cassandra running in production once, and we've been running mongodb in production for about six months now.