January 29, 2009

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.

January 05, 2009

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!