Observations on key-value databases
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
5 Responses to 'Observations on key-value databases'
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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.
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.
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.
afaik CouchDB has mvcc
It does.
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Posted via web from willythewise's posterous
¶ 9/27/2009 08:34:00 PM
