nosql

This is the inaugural post in my "Membase for Dummies" series. The goal of this series is to provide users with quick (5 minutes or less) tutorials on various aspects of Membase functionality.

This first entry is focused on getting your first node of Membase up and running. In this two-minute video, I walk you through the process of downloading, installing and setting up Membase.

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I have been working on getting Membase up'n'running on OpenSolaris as a side project. Most of it is already in place, but there are still some Makefile issues to sort out. I thought that while we're waiting to complete that task, I could show you how to easily run moxi as a service controlled by SMF.

I've created some scripts to make it easier for you to build and install everything, so the first we need to do is to check out (or update your clone) of my tools repository:

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On Tuesday the 26th, I had the opportunity to get in front of the SD Forum Cloud Services SIG.  I talked about Membase and how it fits in to cloud services and cloud platforms from an integration standpoint.  Slides are posted on slideshare.

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GigaOm is definitely stoking the NoSQL discussion by asking whether scalable SQL databases have taken the momentum out of the NoSQL movement. I interpret recent market events somewhat differently however, and want to offer an alternate perspective.

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I read Matt Aslett's (The 451) post on the golden age of open source with interest. In it he describes that we've arrived at the fourth stage of open source, which is ”in short: a return to a focus on collaboration and community, as well as commercial interests."

What we're doing with membase.org definitely falls in line with this description although with a slightly different twist. NorthScale saw the need for a simple, fast, and elastic NoSQL database that we felt wasn’t being met by existing technologies. When it became clear that many prominent companies shared this view and were committed to an open source solution, NorthScale stepped in to shepherd the development of a broad community around the membase.org project. Consistent with Matt Aslett’s description of open source 4.0, the result is a project with an “emphasis on collaboration and community rather than control." While NorthScale has contributed the bulk of the code to the project, our customers Zynga and NHN are co-sponsors of the project who have a strong commitment to its success. This blurring of the line between vendor and customer – the collaboration between two seemingly opposite sides of a transaction – has long set open source apart from the large proprietary vendors who want nothing more than a lock on their customers.

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It seems like just yesterday we posted the bits for Beta 1 for Membase Server, but in fact it was over a month ago and since then we’ve demo’d Membase at a number of events and have had literally hundreds of conversations with users, customers, partners and anyone else interested in NoSQL solutions. It’s been a whirlwind (in a good way!) of activity and I wanted to personally thank everyone who’s been involved and provided feedback. Being the beta program manager, I wanted to touch specifically on the last month as it relates to the beta program at large:

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Another membase milestone was reached today – beta 2 was released and is available for download! Several cool features have been added, including support for datasets whose size exceeds the size of aggregate cluster main memory (i.e. supporting disk > RAM); very sexy, and useful, real-time and historical stat displays; and support for deploying moxi, the membase proxy, on a client-side machine. Looking back over the last three weeks, community reaction to membase has exceeded our collective expectations. We knew we were addressing an unmet need, but it is always a good feeling to hear it confirmed. We’ve had hundreds of downloads of membase beta 1 over the last three weeks and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: - “Membase appears to be the reliable, sharding and persistent memcached-alike we’ve all
    been waiting for…” - “Membase is fast! like memcached fast. very low latency under load and good throughput…” - “Oh this is so hot, so very, very, hot…” But while it is nice to hear the good stuff, I tend to prefer hearing about the things people don’t like or the things users having trouble with.

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It has been just over couple weeks since the launch of membase.org, along with NorthScale's partners at Zynga and NHN.  In that time, we've been steadily increasing the postings on the wiki and responding to questions on the mailing list, the XMPP Chat and the IRC channel.  When questions come up, they tend to be about about how membase compares to other Open Source projects, what kind of client one would use or what the pieces are when deployed.

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A new meme appeared recently at the NoSQL East meetup, suggesting that NoSQL should really stand for "Not Only SQL".  This is a great improvement over plain-old "No SQL" moniker. 

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