distributed key-value stores

NOSQL rallycry for the distributed key value stores a.k.a distribute cache a.k.a. big hastable in the cloud. Didn't you know RDBMS is sooo last century? Not that the DB-vendors are going to be shaking in the boots anytime soon. RDBMS is going to be around for a long long time, but lets face it they just aren't sexy and there is lots of interesting technical stuff going on in the grid world.

Kohsuke fuses lego and nerd (as if that crossover needed more attention)

Lego project - I'm not sure why I find this so fantastic, it's not the way he causually applies the Miller cylindrical projection to lego, it's that in my mind, there's a small bored child wandering away, muttering Daddy's gone all mental again.

YAAR (android rumour), but a juicy one

Rumor: Sony Working on an Android Walkman - makes a lot of sense, pmp's don't compete on just hardware anymore, these days its all about the software. Sony's current walkman beats the iPod on hardware terms, but I would rather an iPod touch for two reasons both software:

• web-browser - Sony's Netfront just doesn't quite cut it.
  
• app-store - I travel a lot, so time-wasting is a high on my list. 

Android provides a route to both - this would be great!

First law of computer science fires again - SimpleDB

We like SimpleDB, we could get started with it quickly. What we didn't like were the usage restrictions, putting attributes up one at a time, we have a lot of attributes to fire up there on a continuous basis, but while we were getting to grips with the basics, the first law of computer science "wait long enough and the requirement will go away or someone else will do it" fired and we got batchput (25 records per request) - which is a lot better (but hey what about 1000). This was critical for us, since uploading records is something that needs to happen quickly - there's a timeliness requirement for us.

The next part of the problem was querying. We are limited to 250 records per select. So larger returned data sets which for us can be common given the current limitations of the select expression language, mean multiple requests. So we were very happen when the law fired again and the Amazon Web Services Blog: New SimpleDB Goodies: Enhanced Select raised the limit to 2500 items per request.

So our faith the AWS will keep putting some investment into SimpleDB is well placed!

Now if they can only add some operators to their select language:  distinct,  avg, min, max, sum we would really be cooking.

Emergency satire

The sat. morning newstalk political satire has started blogging. Excellent. Check out this parody Johnny cash song:  Lenihan Comes Around | The Emergency

Sayonara Ruby, Bonjour Scala

The Register reports that the public ruby-shaped road accident that has been continuing twitter outages has finally led to the ejection of ruby in favour of functional JVM-hosted scala. The real winner here is the JVM and access to pre-existing Java API's. Must start looking into Scala - the Java Posse are always going on about how much they like it and being hosted on the JVM is a big win for them, as it clearly is for Twitter.

Twitter doesn't talk about why moving to JRuby was not an option for them (which is JVM hosted), but presumably the functional aspects of Scale w.r.t concurrency. Functional languages are extremely suited to this at a programming level -  one of the reasons behind choosing Erlang for facebook chat. Plus Scala's type-inference is a real boon for programmers used to the static-typing support in IDE's.

So time to get a book and have a look-see.

Open Cloud Manifesto

The Register just put up details of the Open Cloud Manifesto. This document can be summarised as "clouds are great, clouds with open-standards would be better". Common standards for security, data interoperability and portability, metering, monitoring and management. This is obviously a good idea "lets vote for open standards", but it is a tall order. Microsoft is miffed because (a) it wasn't invited to the manifesto-drafting tea-party and (b) because it is early to be drafting standards. It may have a point on (b) certainly for the M3 part (metering, monitoring and management). However two concerns are so critical to cloud-users that they deserve special accelerated attention:

• Data portability ("Your cloud is useful, but I want to be able to get my data back!") - there's a working group dataportability.org that has already garnered some support (Google, Microsoft, etc) mostly driven by the social networks. Myspace, Google and Facebook are attempting to be the central-site that maintains the "record" of your social graph (who you know, what you like, what groups you join, how you communicate). They want your data to sell advertising plain and simple. For this, they provide some neat services, but lets be clear your data is the crown jewels and they are interested enough in allowing other sites to access your friend graph, but in a kind of hands-off way - no caching - kind of way. This isn't really portability. So this concern is still very much valid.
  
• Security - how do I control access between me and the cloud and between the clouds themselves that manage my data. Luckily OAuth is now effectively a de facto standard here and so it is ready to be blessed as the official cloud standard.
  

However, the cloud manifesto goes further than open standards. It its section "Principles of an Open Cloud" point 2 is:

Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limiting their choice of providers.

and pigs might fly.