In our second episode (12 minutes long), Alex and Nat talk about the new generation of “NoSQL” databases that have created a lot of interest among web developers; especially those lucky people dealing with thousands of simultaneous users and terabytes of data.
Please feel free to leave a comment below after you’ve listened to the episode. We’re still total newbies at this podcasting thing, so your feedback and encouragement are a big help!
If you want to learn more about NoSQL than what we covered in the show, check out these links:
- Nice introduction to all the basic concepts: consistency models, replication, vector clocks.
- A comparison of NoSQL alternatives and a good braindump of the subject matter.
- Amazon Dynamo paper. Great readable paper introducing the core concepts for massively scalable datastores.
- BigTable paper. Another cornerstone paper.
- How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
The Big Guys:
- Voldemort
- Cassandra
- HBase — We didn’t get to this one, but it’s modelled on BigTable, and can replicate across geographically separated datacenters (Cassandra needs faster roundtrips). And it’s what Hadoop uses internally.
Midsized:
- MongoDB — Great for storing JSON objects.
- CouchDB — Erlang based, uses javascript as a query language.
Niche:
- Redis — memcached with persistence and useful list/set/ordered-set datatypes.
- Redis twitter implementation — simple example of building a twitter-like system on top of redis.
Underlying Technology
- Consistent Hashing.
- Vector Clocks — See section 4.4 in the Amazon Dynamo paper.
- Important relationship between Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance, called the CAP Theorem.
The image above is a picture of a Google datacenter in Oregon, where they no doubt run BigTable.
14 Comments
I really liked this ‘cast! Got me thinking, kept me laughing, and just plain entertained me more than the first one. Thanks guys!
I know this is way too subjective, but I’d recommend MyNoSQL http://nosql.mypopescu.com as a great source to learn about NoSQL. Pretty much all great NoSQL content gets on MyNoSQL.
Alex – that’s a great resource. Thanks for sharing!
That was a great episode, perfect length and subject. Thanks so much for doing this.
Great work. Keep it up.
Great episode, nice explanations of the systems without leaving us non experts behind.
Please do keep it up.. Depth was spot on and length is ideal.
Great show!! I learned a lot about NoSQL. Thanks for doing the show and I sure hope you guys keep producing it. Length and content was perfect! Can’t wait for the next show…?
Just dropping another kudos on the length and topic. Nicely done.
Enjoying the shows so far. Keep it up!
I loved the NoSQL podcast. very informative. keep up the great work. and get an identica group or something.
Hi.
Again a very good podcast: Very condensed but yet very easy to understand … I like “eventual consistency”
When is the next episode due ?
Great episode! NoSQL sounds really cool.
Just found this podcast and listened to Ep 1 & 2. I really liked the NoSQL content. Just the right length to get me interested and deciding if I want to learn more on my own.