Cloud computing: scalable DB

[David Bovill]

Thanks Andre:

On 18 May 2010 13:18, Andre Garzia <andre at andregarzia.com> wrote:

>
> * CouchDB http://couchdb.apache.org/
> * MongoDB http://www.mongodb.org/ (there's a mongo db hosting service at
> MongoHQ )
> * Cassandra http://cassandra.apache.org/
> * Riak http://riak.basho.com/
>

I think it is only really Amazon SimpleDB and Google App engine that offer
automatic cloud-based scaleability? Perhaps MongoDB - but I like the idea of
going with a big player on this.

At the moment it seems that SimpleDB is offered optimally in different
regions, and I am not quite sure yet how you would offer global access based
on a single data source offered in all regions (with SimpleDB the regional
instances are seperate stores) - maybe AppEngine??? For now I think unless
you want to write in Python code as well it is better to use SimpleDB from
Rev - that way you can access it from Desktop as well as webApps.

Also interesting though more expensive is the idea of using MySQL (sqlLite
locally) and being able to move over to Amazon
RDS<http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/#rds>for scalability - but
you only need that for complex DB's I think.

This is a really good read and recent review at
InfoWorld<http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/slacker-databases-break-all-the-old-rules-599?page=0,7>
.

I think most of the data we're trying to store these days is document based
> where we have something abstract which we call a document and this document
> have properties and fields where we store data or other documents such as
> an
> address book can have different entries and fields for different contacts.
> This kind of "problem" is easily solved with the above solutions and harder
> to code with plain old relational systems.
>

I particularly like the idea of not having to get into complex relational db
design, but using simple parallel tables and doing the joins in the
application layer ( ie revTalk) - seems the way to go to me - if you can
break the data into object-like chinks where your parallel queries retrieve
small quantities of data that you use revTalk to massage - sounds great. Not
for banks maybe - but for most of the rest of use cases.