While in conference mode¹ I’m like a sponge, I’m almost no good at putting all my chaotic notes in a format that is usable to anyone else.

Alex Siculars has done a great job writing down his thoughts about Basho’s fantastic Ricon 2012 and linking to his post makes me feel less guilty for not being able to post mines—I’m learning to get better for the next events:

Chatter by conference attendees left me convinced that Ricon was a success. Ricon was-well executed, well-attended and actually interesting. But more importantly, it was relevant. For those of us at the conference, we actually work in this space. We are interested in the ongoing development of distributed solutions to a number of problems. The conference delivered on creating a space that brought us together to share solutions and learn about continuing advancements. For a new conference to have a successful maiden voyage is no small feat in my book. I, for one, am looking forward to the next one.

My only contribution to Alex Sicular’s great recap is to provide some links to the talks his blog post refers to:

Joe Hellerstein: Programming Principles for a Distributed Era

The PDF can be downloaded from here

Eric Brewer: Advancing Distributed Systems

Russel Brown and Sean Cribbs: Data Structures in Riak

Bryan Fink: Riak Pipe: Distributed Processing System

Ryan Zezeski: Yokozuna: Riak + Solr

More presentation slides can be found on the official Ricon 2012 site.

Original title and link: Alex Sicular’s Recap of Ricon 2012, a Distributed Systems Conference for Developers (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://siculars.posterous.com/ricon-2012-recap

A dynamo-as-a-service offered by Amazon on their ecosystem will appeal to some. For others, the benefits of a Dynamo-inspired product that can be deployed on other public clouds, behind-the-firewall, or not on the cloud at all, will be critical.

Objective. Clear. To the point.

Original title and link: Basho: Congratulations, Amazon! (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://basho.com/blog/technical/2012/01/18/Congratulations-Amazon/

Don Rippert interviewed by Derrick Harris (GigaOm):

Enterprises will start adopting NoSQL en masse, Rippert thinks, because the types of data they’re now dealing with require new technologies. “We are the data store for the new type of data being stored,” he explained. […]

That data is largely of the unstructured variety coming from web applications, machines and other sources that aren’t the traditional business-transaction data for which relational databases were created. Relational databases were the answer to almost everything previously, but now Rippert thinks NoSQL is “the answer to about 40 percent of business use cases today”.

A couple of follow up questions for Don Rippert^[1]:

1. Is your prediction of 40% market share relative to scenarios for large scale, unstructured data with high availability requirements? That would basically mean a 40% market share for just a couple of products: Cassandra, HBase, Riak, Project Voldemort, and (probably) Couchbase.

2. How is the rest of 60% of the market devided between the other NoSQL databases, NewSQL databases, and the traditional relational databases?

3. Considering the current market structure, when do you think the shift towards large scale, highly available requirements happened?

4. How long do you think it will take the market to remodel? What factors will accelerate this transition?

Original title and link: 40% Penetration for NoSQL: An Interview With Basho’s CEO Don Rippert (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://gigaom.com/cloud/why-accentures-cto-made-the-move-to-nosql-startup-ceo/

After Innostore and Bitcask, Basho guys are currently experimenting with integrating Google’s LevelDB as a storage engine for Riak. Preliminary results are looking promising:

For most Riak users, Bitcask is the obvious right storage engine to use. It provides low latency, solid predictability, is robust in the face of crashes, and is friendly from a filesystem backup point of view. However, it has one notable limitation: total RAM use depends linearly (though via a small constant) on the total number of objects stored. For this reason, Riak users that need to store billions of entries per machine sometimes use Innostore (our wrapper around embedded InnoDB) as their storage engine instead. InnoDB is a robust and well-known storage engine, and uses a more traditional design than Bitcask which allows it to tolerate a higher maximum number of items stored on a given host.

It appears that LevelDB may become a preferred choice for Riak users whose data set has massive numbers of keys and therefore is a poor match with Bitcask’s model. Performance aside, it compares favorably to InnoDB on other issues such as permissive license and operational usability.

Original title and link: Riak Getting LevelDB as Storage Engine (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.basho.com/2011/07/01/Leveling-the-Field/

This couldn’t go unmentioned:

Basho Technologies, a data storage and management software startup serving the enterprise market, this morning announced that it has raised $7.5 million in Series D funding.

In addition, Basho announced that its board of directors has named Donald J. Rippert, long time CTO of Accenture, as the company’s new president and chief executive officer.

Couple of comments:

1. I couldn’t figure out if this is a completely new financing round than the $7.5mil. announced in February
2. The new CEO has been responsible for two main areas back at Accenture: the technology consulting organization and the research and development organization. That basically means a good perspective on the industry and lots of connections, but also knowledge of product development.

Original title and link: Basho: New Financing, New CEO (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2011/06/29/big-data-storage-startup-basho-nabs-7-5m-and-accenture-cto-don-rippert/

Justin Sheehy (CTO Basho) answers Michael Coté’s (RedMonk) questions about Basho, the current state of NoSQL, and polyglot persistence adoptions among developers.

via: http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2011/06/20/justin-sheehy-on-basho-nosql/

Kresten Krab Thorup continues his experiments becoming more and more of an advocate of Riak:

The module riak_link_index provides a mechanism that can be applicable for some situations, providing means to create synthetic (secondary link index) objects triggered by a Riak commit hook. The mechanism work by defining a function that names these synthetic objects as a function of the primary object body.

As far as I can tell Basho is already working on adding secondary indices to Riak.

Original title and link: Riak Secondary Indices using Links (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://www.javalimit.com/2011/04/using-to-index-riak-objects.html