Our philosophy at Clustrix is all about giving the application developers the maximum amount of flexibility, fault tolerance, and ease of use. We offer full relational semantics but you can still implement schemas that are simple key/value pairs if that’s appropriate for the app. We offer full transactional support for atomic updates but you can still modify items one at a time if you want. Writes are guaranteed durable and consistent so apps don’t have to worry about the artifacts that show up with eventual consistency. We build appliances so we can guarantee performance, reliability, and durability without requiring the customer to configure or tune anything. I have a few blog entries on this sort of stuff at: http://www.clustrix.com/resources/blog/ that goes into some of these things in more detail.

Our goal is to be a good fit for exactly this sort of environment and over time we’ll be able to prove that in the market.

Aaron Passey
CTO
Clustrix

Anything with an HTTP interface can do this, including Riak. For example, Sean Cribbs created this chat app as a demo for a presentation on Riak I gave at Velocity: https://github.com/seancribbs/yakriak .

Of course. But I’m not exactly in the position of choosing database systems for a large company with a huge amount of data, my interest only peaks into the server realm when I get the itch. So my knowledge about any other NoSQL dbase aside from CouchDB is limited. (I only looked at CouchDB because it was recommended by a friend, and I was so enthralled by what I found I jumped in head first.)

Thanks for that link. I had seen that Digg downplayed Cassandra’s roles in their troubles, which I of course expected. Still it’s nice to see an in-depth technical reasoning behind their rebuking.

“My personal experience with Cassandra is that it takes careful planning and operational discipline to use it at scale. What database requires otherwise, though?”

Naturally. But at least in comparison to RDBMS’s I find Couch much much more “relaxing,” which I guess is the whole point. :P

“I agree completely. For a natively distributed alternative to CouchDB, have a look at Riak: http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak”

I will, thanks. But for the moment I’m way too hooked on the idea of CouchApps.

This is an unfortunate bit of FUD. Here are 2 Digg engineers disputing that claim: http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-Digg-v4s-technical-failures . I hope people will learn to take articles (even mine!) from various industry sites with a grain of salt. A bit of investigation on your own is worth the effort.

My personal experience with Cassandra is that it takes careful planning and operational discipline to use it at scale. What database requires otherwise, though?

“A schemaless document-store which uses JSON and communicated over HTTP is just plain awesome”

I agree completely. For a natively distributed alternative to CouchDB, have a look at Riak: http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak

On the other hand, while I’ve been extremely apprehensive of NoSQL for the past year (multiplied by Digg’s issues with Cassandra), I’ve been really sipping on the CouchDB kool-aid. A schemaless document-store which uses JSON and communicated over HTTP is just plain awesome, and throws LAMP and its derivatives on their heads. Additionally, you can even attach files to the database to make a “CouchApp” – an application/website served directly from the database. Basically, you only have to know HTML and Javascript for it to work; no server side language like Rails or PHP, and no query language like MySQL. The more I learn, the more it seems like the future of the web. Doesn’t hurt CouchDB is immensely replicable.

People who continuously confuse the Relational Model and SQL, both logical/mathematical concepts, with some sort of physical implementation and problems thereof, like the above Twitter DB explanation.

Yes, traditional DBMSes have legacy engines that are poorly-suited to the modern world of the few sites that manage billions of users, but that doesn’t mean you throw away the baby with the bathwater…