by Angela Guess
A recent article discusses the options available to developers and companies looking to adopt a NoSQL solution, noting, “The good news is that developers and companies evaluating whether it makes sense to adopt a NoSQL approach have a growing number of options, many of them free and open-source solutions.”
The first listed option is Cassandra, the solution utilized by Facebook: “Another Apache Software Foundation project, Cassandra is a distributed database that allows for decentralized data storage that is fault tolerant and has no single point of failure. In other words, ‘Cassandra is suitable for applications that can’t afford to lose data.’”
Next up is Hypertable: “Modeled after Google’s BigTable database system, Hypertable’s creators aim for it to be the ‘open source standard for highly available, petabyte scale, database systems.’ In other words, Hypertable is designed for storing massive amounts of data reliably across many cheap servers.”
Then there’s MongoDB, the solution used by the New York Times: “MongoDB is a document-oriented database that uses a JSON-style data format. It’s ideal for website data storage, content management and caching applications, and can be configured for replication and high availability.”
Next is CouchDB, utilized by the BBC: “A product of the Apache Software Foundation, CouchDB is another document-oriented database that stores data in JSON format. It’s ACID compliant, and like MongoDB, can be used to store data and content for websites, and to provide caching.”
Finally, there is Memcached, the solution used by Wikipedia, WordPress, Flickr, and Craigslist: “Memcached is an in-memory caching system ideal for storing relatively small amounts of data that applications would otherwise need to retrieve from a database. Originally created for LiveJournal, Memcached is now one of the most popular caching tools for large consumer websites.”
photo credit: Cassandra
