102 items tagged “databases”
2008
Spock Proxy. A MySQL Proxy fork (no Lua) that concentrates solely on sharding, by parsing incoming SQL statements and redirecting them across multiple databases. There are some limitations on the SQL that can be handled (no nested queries, joins across a maximum of two tables) but generally it looks pretty impressive.
A Brief Tour of Graphd. The secret sauce behind Freebase—a custom written graph server that models everything as a typed, versioned relationship and can churn through over 3,000 simple queries a second on a single AMD64 core.
Hugely informative thread on multi-db support in Django. I brain-dumped some ideas for a Django multi-database connection API on the developer list, and got a ton of smart push-back from people who’ve been there and have the scars to prove it.
Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?”. Exciting news in the world of MySQL: Drizzle is a new project to produce a massively stripped down version of the database server—InnoDB/UTF8 only, no permissions, views, stored procedures or triggers, simplified field types, optimised for the common subset of functionality used by web apps. MySQL’s Firefox?
Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication into core PostgreSQL, so as to leave room for development of competing solutions [...] However, it is becoming clear that this policy is hindering acceptance of PostgreSQL to too great an extent, compared to the benefit it offers to the add-on replication projects. Users who might consider PostgreSQL are choosing other database systems because our existing replication options are too complex to install and use for simple cases.
— Tom Lane
Sun To Acquire MySQL. Sun also employ Josh Berkus, one of the lead developers of PostgreSQL.
2007
What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon have finally launched the database component of their web service suite. It fits a bunch of current trends: key/value pairs, schemaless, built on top of Erlang. “Eventual consistency” is an interesting characteristic.
PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 4 release notes. In addition to the huge speed improvements, 8.3 adds support for XML, UUID and ENUM data types and brings full text (tsearch2) in to the core database engine.
Django Evolution. Really smart take on the problem of updating database tables to reflect changes to Django models. Code that automatically modifies your database tables can be pretty scary, but Evolution seems to hit the right balance.
CouchDB “Joins”. Different approaches to indexing a blog post and its associated comments in the non-relational CouchDB.
CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS. CouchDB is a fascinating project—an Erlang powered non-relational database with a JSON API that lets you define “views” (really computed tables) based on JavaScript functions that execute using map/reduce. Damien Katz, the main developer currently works for MySQL and used to work on Lotus Notes.
SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome. I’m beginning to think that for scalable applications the thinner your ORM is the better—if you even use one at all.