Impact of Digg issues on Cassandra

TechCrunch had an article today in which it was announced that Digg had fired their VP of engineering, John Quinn. It appears, with all of the troubles that Digg has had since v4 of the UI was released, that someone was going to take some major heat. It appears Quinn was that person. However, other details that were discussed in the post were far more pertinent to NoSQL was the discussion that Cassandra is to blame for some of the problems.

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Links of the Day - 2010/07/01

Links of the Day for July 1st, 2010

• Notes from a production MongoDB deployment - David Mytton describes his experiences with MongoDB in a production enviroment. Discusses namespace limits, replication, durability and support from 10Gen. David also tells if he would choose MongoDB again.
• Reflections on MongoDB - Brandon Keepers of Collective Idea presents some thoughts about their usage of MongoDB. My favorite quote "MongoDB is not all leprechauns and unicorns. It’s the bleeding edge, and you will bleed."
• Sones releases the first open source edition of their GraphDB
• Migrating to CouchDB with a Focus on Views - John P. Wood provides a case study of his attempt to migrate to CouchDB. John puts it best "We faced several challenges migrating to CouchDB and learned some important lessons along the way. All of those challenges will be addressed here." We will be coming back to this post, in the future, to discuss it in more detail.

Digg moves from MySQL to Cassandra

The following blog discusses why the Digg engineering team made the switch, dropping MySQL in favor of Apache's Cassandra. The blog post mentions a common motivations why developers are looking at other ways to build applications.

Our primary motivation for moving away from MySQL is the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced us into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead.

With that said, most sites are going to be the size of Facebook or Digg. So their performance and scalability characteristics are going to be much different. However, that doesn't mean their isn't a place for technologies such as Cassandra in your technology stack.

Read More: Saying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra

MongoDB in the wild

Often times you read papers and posts about why someone is choosing a particular NoSQL database over another. Almost invariably you see the feature matrix describing why their choice was the best. It is usually hit or miss whether those same folks come back to tell us the results. Well in this particular case we are in luck. David Mytton from BoxedIce has taken the time to post their experience with MongoDB  in production and answers the important question, would they pick MongoDB again?

Read More: Notes from a production MongoDB deployment