george.james's blog
March 13th was the 20th anniversary of the very first paper, by Tim Berners-Lee, describing the World Wide Web. There was a conference at CERN on this date to celebrate this anniversary and to look forward to the next 20 years. I was lucky enough to be present and took the opportunity to ask Tim about scalability. His reply is all here on film. Note his final comments, if anyone has studied this problem then he'd like to hear from them. |
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I stumbled across a very nice web-based IRC client today so I thought I'd add it to the site. Click here or click on Chat at the top right of this page to access it. It'll take you into two IRC chat rooms. One for slipstream and one for gtm. If you want to get something off your chest then try out one of these. This is very much an experiment and I'll be interested to see how each channel gets used. |
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Rob and I have just published a presentation on slideshare titled Mumps the Internet Scale Database. It looks at the fit between the plain old Mumps database and the needs of Internet scale applications (think Google search, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, etc). Many of the largest scale Internet plays have found conventional relational databases to be inadequate for their needs. In most cases they've had to innovate and cobble together something useable from scratch. The traditional SQL solutions were neither scaleable enough or affordable. Some of their solutions, such as Amazon's SimpleDB and Google's BigTable, are now starting to appear as commercial products that others with Internet-scale needs can also use. I've written previously about Drizzle, a fork of MySQL, which tries to be an Internet-scale solution, by throwing out a lot of SQL clutter. In most cases, when trying to create a database that will scale sufficiently, the first casualty is SQL. This is certainly the case for BigTable and SimpleDB. Neither have full implementations of SQL and we get back to schemaless, hierarchical databases. Why? Because they are fast and flexible. The overheads of SQL add nothing in the context of large scale Internet databases and simply slow down the speed of development and, more importantly, the performance of the application. Our presentation shows how plain old Mumps is a well proven database solution with a track record of success that meets all of the needs of Internet scale applications. It explains what the issues are and how the new kids, Amazon and Google, have had to innovate to scale. It goes on to show how Mumps has already solved these problems and is a freely available alternative to Amazon's and Google's pay-per-use propositions. Enjoy... |
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Part of the point of my recent presentation about BigTable was that conventional databases just don't cut it for Internet Scale applications. Drizzle is newly announced fork of MySQL that cuts out a lot of features (triggers, stored procedures, etc) with the goal of producing a highly scalable database that is suitable for Internet Scale problems. http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Drizzle-MySQL-slims-down-on-Aker-s-... |
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