MongoDB on Ubuntu with Ruby

No real big write required for this post other than this is a good post giving detailed instructions for installing MongoDB on Ubuntu. In addition, the post details how to use Ruby with MongoDB as well.

Read more: Setting up MongoDB on Ubuntu 10.04 and trying it out with Ruby

How MongoDB Helps Yottaa Scale Ruby

This next presentation is pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I think it has an interesting sequence of slides that depict various architecture choices that could be made and why each one of them is not suitable, excluding of course the one that chooses MongoDB. Secondly, it effectively demonstrates the benefits of using documents versus the standard relational rows.

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ACLatraz: Redis-powered access control for your ruby apps

In this post, Wynn Netherland discusses a project ACLatraz, an open-source access control framework for Ruby applications built on the Redis key-value NoSQL Database.

Read more: ACLatraz: Redis-powered access control for your ruby apps

ACLatraz source: ACLatraz

Practical Ruby Projects with MongoDB

Alex Sharp, the Lead Developer at OptimusDev, discusses in his presentation at Ruby Midwest some practical Ruby projects for MongoDB. Things are typically easier when you see a use case and an implementation that solves the use case. That is the approach that Alex has taken in his presentation he presents four use cases:

1. Accounting Application
2. Capped Collection Logging
3. Blogging App
4. Reporting App

There are several points that Alex discusses, however, here are a few highlights:

• Instead of JOINs across separate tables you can use embedded documents.
• Embedded documents eliminate many modeling headaches
• MongoDB allows for fast writes (fire and forget)
• In-place updates
• Optimize your reads with indexes

Check it out!

On Rails with Apache Cassandra

In the following presentation Stu Hood, Technical Lead at Rackspace, discusses Cassandra and Ruby. Some of the more interesting points from the discussion are the reasons provided by Hood to use a solution like Cassandra.

• Large dataset, specifically, dataset larger than one node can handle
• Volitile dataset with write percentages greater than 25%
• Expensive, to quote Stu "More than you can afford with a commercial solution"

Another point that is interesting, which is known but hasn't really been discussed in detail is Cassandra's lineage. It's widely known that Cassandra is a blend of Amazon's Dynamo and Google's BigTable solutions. Stu discusses what Cassandra has pulled from each data store.

Amazon's Dynamo:

• No node in the cluster is special
• Gossip technique
• Eventual consistency

Google's BigTable:

• "Column Family" Data Model
• Range queries for rows
  • Scans rows in order
• Memtable/SSTable Structure
  • Always write sequentially to disk
  • Bloom filters to minimize random reads
  • Trounces B-Tree for big data
    • Linear insert performance
    • Log growth for reads

Lots of other goodies in the presentation.

Zero to Mongo in 60 Hours

Ryan Angilly, a Senior Developer from MyPunchbowl.com and self proclaimed "pretty awesome dude" brings us our next presentation about how MyPunchbowl.com integrated MongoDB into their software stack and into production in 60 hours.

Why did they choose MongoDB? Ryan lists six strengths of MongoDB:

1. Easy to get running
2. Open Source
3. Support in multiple (computer) languages. Prototype in Ruby, move to Java if necessary
4. Very active development
5. Full featured
6. Great ecosystem

Ryan does a good job of describing the various stages of development, testing and deployment. Finally, Ryan discusses where they are at 200 days later and what tripped them up during the process.