Blogs
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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Hot on the heels of our release of EWD as an Open Source product, we're now doing the same with M/DB, releasing it as a Free Open Source product licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3. A new build of the M/DB Virtual Appliance is now available for download. This contains full source code for M/DB in the directory /usr/local/gtm/ewd. The names of the M/DB Mumps routines are prefixed "MDB". By releasing M/DB as Open Source software, we're hoping that others will assist in extending its capabilities. Areas where additional effort would be welcomed include: - emulating the new Select action that has been added to SimpleDB The new release includes the new Free Open Source standalone m_apache gateway. You should notice a significant increase in performance: M/DB is now blindingly fast! We hope you all enjoy the new Free Open Source M/DB, a product that showcases the internet-scale capabilities of Mumps technology, and its pre-eminence as a schemaless, hierarchical database. |
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When? - 25th March 2009 Where? - Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, Phoenix, Arizona George James Software and M/Gateway Developments will host the next in their popular and unique series of Out of the Slipstream conferences. Speakers will be drawn from various international businesses to give their slant on 'the cloud'. Not only will you be enthralled by thought-provoking presentations, but we are planning some good old British fun for the evening. Watch this space for news and details of how to secure your place. |
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Well, after all that talk about Mumps as an Internet-scale hierarchical, schemaless database, we decided to do something about it: We are pleased and excited to announce M/DB, our new API-compatible alternative to Amazon's SimpleDB. M/DB makes use of the inherent natural hierarchical, schemaless characteristics of the Mumps database to deliver an identical experience to SimpleDB. Actually M/DB's use of Mumps has allowed it to pull off two tricks that differentiate it from SimpleDB: - SimpleDB limits you to just 1k per attribute which many people find to be just too limiting. M/DB increases that to 32k (and I think that, too, can be increased). - SimpleDB treats everything as text, so if you need to hold integer or real values and make comparative queries on them, you have to do extremely tedious tricks such as packing them out with leading zeros. M/DB's underlying Mumps engine, of course, applies its dynamic data-typing, so numbers behave properly as numbers without needing any The initial beta release of M/DB is in the form of a VMWare Virtual Appliance, so it can be used as a standalone "black-box" database, accessed via its REST APIs. The Virtual Appliance has been built using GT.M and our latest version of the MGWSI gateway which provides direct HTTP access to the GT.M engine via Apache. If anyone is interested in building their own M/DB system on top of an existing GT.M or Cache platform, get in touch. Yes, you saw that correctly: M/DB will also run on top of Cache. We believe that M/DB heralds a new role for the Mumps database technology in the Internet-scale database world, particularly for cloud service providers who want to produce an alternative or back-up to SimpleDB. For more information about M/DB, visit our web site at http://www.mgateway.com By the way, we're looking for others to consider adding value-added services to M/DB through simple, abstracted REST APIs. Backup and other such administrative tasks is one area that comes to mind. Get in touch if you have any thoughts and ideas. |
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