Scalable, reliable key-value lookup service

Here's a great summary of most of the available key-value storage services from Richard Jones of last.FM - great stuff.

From what I can tell, Scalaris is only memory-resident at the moment and doesn’t persist data to disk. This makes it entirely impractical to actually run a service like Wikipedia on Scalaris for real - but it sounds like they tackled the hard problems first, and persisting to disk should be a walk in the park after you rolled your own version of Chord and made Paxos your bitch.

I'm leaning towards Voldemort, but need to look into this more.

McSweeney's : Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?

Good gravy, this gave me a great laugh!

Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?

You've got to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt

ONE: Hairy One, Maker of Fire. Maker of Fire, the Hairy One.


MAKER: My pleasure, Hairy One. I've followed your work with Ten Men for a long time. It's a remarkable firm.


HAIRY ONE: So you're the one with the fire?


MAKER: Yes.


HAIRY ONE: Is it here?


MAKER: Well, no.


HAIRY ONE: Where is it?


MAKER: Well, in a sense, Hairy One, fire is everywhere. Rather than being an object, say, like your sharp stick, it's really a process, so it can't really be said to exist anywhere. In a sense, fire exists in its own imaginary, virtual space, where we can only talk about what is not fire and what might become fire.


HAIRY ONE: Whoa whoa whoa! English, please!