mult.ifario.us

Ben Black, one of the organizers of no:sql(east). conference, tweeted, and I twote:

Chris Williams, another no:sql(east). organizer, has had similar sentiments, but what really needs to happen is for people to stop using the "NoSQL" term. I originally proposed "dbng" for next-generation database (and with an intended allusion to RELAX NG), but I'm warming up to Ben Black's suggestion of "altdb" for the hint of Usenet alt.* if nothing else.

I propose a new movement called the NoNoSQL movement. It is a movement for those interested in alternative and next-generation databases but not in the inaccurate "NoSQL" neologism.

Seems like some cool altdb schwag (t-shirts, mugs, etc.) is in order — "Not your daddy's database." or "Joiners need not apply." or...

Dan and I just finished up our talk at OSCON. You can download the slides or view it on Slideshare. I'll probably take it down at some point in the near future, but the sample system from the presentation is up and running for the moment.

We got started on the material for the talk several months back with the Twitter one-to-many publishing problem as a motivating problem to play with various non-relational data stores, and after some dabbling with Cassandra and HBase, we ended up focusing on Voldemort as an initial backend for the system. It is very likely that we'll craft some additional backends, and I'd particularly like to get to a more forgiving model for storing lists. (I'm already part way there on Dynomite with Osmos as the storage engine.)

The system described in the talk uses a small (two nodes) Voldemort cluster and a small cluster of web nodes (JAX-RS with a jQuery front-end) to implement enough microblogging functionality to be interesting — users, follow/followed, publishing — along with a simple dashboard implemented with Cacti and rudimentary deployment automation. The source is out on GitHub if you want to take a look. (Feel free to fork with it...)

Dan's blog entry on the presentation is here.