1. Cassandra is getting closer to release the 0.5.0 version that will bring a ton of improvements. As far as I can tell it will be the first Cassandra release that we will have the chance to cover here on MyNoSQL.
2. Neo4j is also getting closer to finally release the 1.0 version. After the neo4j 1.0-b11, the guys have released an RC, so I expect the final release to follow shortly.
3. Project Voldemort is preparing to release the 0.70 version which will bring the much awaited rebalancing feature. The previous Project Voldemort release has been preparing the ground for this exciting feature.
4. Terrastore have been upgraded to use a new version of Terracotta and also refactored the internal communication protocol this leading to a 5x speedup. I guess the upcoming release will look quite nice.
5. Last, but not least, Redis has released the 1.2.0 version. The new version provides quite a few new features, so a more detailed article about Redis 1.2.0 is in work.

I don’t know how many have heard of or used Drizzle [1], the MySQL engine optimized for cloud and net applications, but there seems to be some activity (from Marcus Eriksson) around creating Drizzle replication to different NoSQL stores: Project Voldemort and memcached [2] or Cassandra [3].

Leaving aside the technical details — which are definitely interesting [4], the solution using the Erlang AMQP [5] implementation RabbitMQ [6] — I think this replication layer could represent a good basis for SQL-NoSQL hybrid solutions, which is a direction we’ve mentioned before: Introducing the Oracle-SimpleDB Hybrid

It would be interesting to hear other stories from those that are investigating the NoSQL hybrid solutions.

And while we are at MySQL engines, I thought I should also mention this question from Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik):

anyone try or using TokuDB [7]? drop in MySQL engine using fractral trees, claims 10-50x over InnoDB, etc.

I somehow missed the release announcement for Project Voldemort v0.60. I have picked a couple of interesting new additions from the release notes [1]:

• Admin Client/Server API [2] (nb make sure you are reading the linked article as it provides much more details than the javadoc)
  • extraction of data for backups
  • extraction of all keys
  • bulk loading entries
  • migrating partitions
  • get/update metadata info for selective Nodes
  • used for node rebalancing (still in development)
• Experimental support for views [3]
• Interpolation search for read-only stores [4]
• LZF compression [5]

You can download the new version from GitHub

Jay Kreps had a talk at QCon SF: ☞ Project Voldemort: Scaling Simple Storage At LinkedIn and you can ☞ dowload the slides in PDF format.

A paper by Ian Thomas Varley, M.S.E. covering the following aspects of non-relational databases:

• use cases
• pros and cons
• design strategies

The paper in PDF format can be downloaded from ☞ here