Elevation. why you feel good after seeing a great movie.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/12/the_best_films_of_2009.html
Don't go to movies often but I love his reviews. Wonderful words.

One of the annual highlights. This is part one of three. Watch for them all.

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Chef Paul Bartolotta wants you to eat like an Italian villager. Never mind that facilitating such a modest act will require speeding refrigerator trucks, thermal microchips, and an on-staff marine biologist. His Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare in the Wynn Las Vegas Hotel offers species that rarely make it onto US plates. Some menu regulars: three different kinds of lobster, Mediterranean snapper baked in a shell of its native sea salt, and grilled Sicilian amberjack, which is firm like swordfish but even moister. Here's how a typical shipment gets from pier to platter in just 53 hours.

Get Set, Go! A fisherman catches a particularly nice specimen—perhaps a blade fish (great for grilling)—and emails a pic to Bartolotta, who texts his buyer to add it to his order. » Hour 5 Cruising the market in Milan, the buyer spots other interesting species, like the strong-flavored Mediterranean horse mackerel, and Skypes his finds to the chef. » Hour 6 More than 45 species are packed up: Live crustaceans are wrapped in damp towels and straw, the swimmers in waxed paper. One fish in each container is microchipped.

Hour 10 The shipper books several flights to ensure the cargo gets on the first plane to take off. At the last second, he tells the racing driver which of Milan's three airports is optimal. » Hour 11 During the 14-hour flight, crabs, lobsters, and langoustines reach a semidormant state. The microchips take temperature readings every 20 minutes. » Hour 25 The flight lands at LAX. Handlers unload Bartolotta's coolers and place them in a waiting refrigerator truck, which zooms off through the desert to Las Vegas.

Hour 31 At the restaurant, kitchen staff review the chip data to make sure container temps stayed cold en route. Bartolotta checks the fish for odor and appearance. » Hour 33 A marine biologist tests the crustaceans for liveliness. Healthy specimens are transferred to a saltwater tank. Weaker ones might end up in sauce. » Dinnertime The next evening, waiters unveil the chef's specials: blade fish, turbot, spiny scorpion fish—all around $60 and all so fresh they're practically twitching.¹

Illustrations: Rafael Macho

Very interesting article.

Just ridiculously cool

Observations on key-value databases

with 5 comments

Key-value databases are catching fire these days. Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Keyspace, Tokyo Tyrant, and a handful of others are surging in popularity, judging by the contents of my feed reader.

I find a number of things interesting about these tools.

• There are many more of them than open-source traditional relational databases. (edit: I mean that there are many options that all seem similar to each other, instead of 3 or 4 standing out as the giants.)
• It seems that a lot of people are simultaneously inventing solutions to their problems in private without being aware of each other, then open-sourcing the results. That points to a sudden sea change in architectures. Tipping points tend to be abrupt, which would explain isolated redundant development.
• Many of the products are feature-rich with things programmers need: diverse language bindings, APIs, embeddability, and the ability to speak familiar protocols such as memcached protocol.
• I think there are more solutions here than the ecosystem will support, and in five years a few will stand out as the most popular.
• This process of paring down the gene pool is win-win because they’re open-source, and nothing will be lost.
• Choosing which one to use is no easy task even for a highly skilled, technical, up-to-date person. Perhaps the decision-makers will choose on the availability of commercial support and consulting.
• Many of them offer built-in, dead-simple, distributed, synchronous replication. This is very difficult to achieve with traditional relational databases. What makes key-value databases different? They don’t have MVCC, for one thing; but I’m not sure of the complete answer to that question, to tell the truth.

We live in interesting times.

Written by Xaprb

September 20th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

Posted in SQL

Tagged with cassandra, distributed, key-value, Keyspace, memcached, NoSQL, redis, replication, synchronous, Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant

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5 Responses to 'Observations on key-value databases'

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1. I’m kind of surprised you didn’t mention MongoDB – it’s probably the NoSQL database I’m most interested in. It answers your ‘is it going to be supported?’ question quite well – there’s a company (10gen) behind it.

   

   Morgan Tocker

   20 Sep 09 at 8:18 pm

2. I wasn’t trying to give a complete list, just drop some names to hand-wave so people would know what category I’m talking about.

   

   Xaprb

   20 Sep 09 at 8:37 pm

3. Mongo is a great product but it’s a tad different in the DB graph (i.e., feature versus raw throughput). Mongo would probably perform really well in a simple key/value (versus the more sophisticated Mongo document design) scenario but I haven’t seen any numbers published.

   

   Ryan

   20 Sep 09 at 8:39 pm

4. afaik CouchDB has mvcc

   

   Jo

   21 Sep 09 at 2:57 am

5. It does.

   

   Xaprb

   21 Sep 09 at 8:42 am

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