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jbellis

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"Twitter Drops MySQL For Cassandra"
74 points by jbellis 5 months ago | link | top
cached 5 months ago
I tried to explain to the reporter why Cassandra's data model (particularly that it supports an arbitrary number of columns per row) makes it support denormalization better than traditional rdbmses, and somehow that got turned into "cassandra supports an arbitrary number of rows."

This and a few other poor explanations make me wince reading this. So I don't particularly recommend this article, although I've seen worse. :)

TFA does at least link the original interview w/ Ryan King of Twitter (http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/cassandra-twitter-...) which is much better for people at HN level.

My own article at http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2010/02/25/should-you-swi..., although high level, also has some useful links for those who want to drill down for more details.

Palm apologizes to JWZ (galbraiths.org)
71 points by jbellis 10 months ago | link
cached 4 months ago
Digg Saying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra (digg.com)
67 points by jbellis 4 months ago | link
cached 4 months ago
Reddit joins Digg, Twitter on Cassandra (reddit.com)
67 points by jbellis 4 months ago | link
cached 4 months ago
"Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage"
49 points by jbellis 11 months ago | link | parent | top
cached 5 months ago
> While technology isn't more than any typical hacker can slap together in their apartment

I think you missed the part about testing a dozen SATA cards, etc.

The attention to detail here is a lot more than something you'd slap together in your apartment.

"A new approach to China: an update"
44 points by jbellis 4 months ago | link | top
cached 4 months ago
The last paragraph says a lot between the lines. "Please don't put our employees in jail."
POSIX v. reality: A position on O_PONIES (lwn.net)
39 points by jbellis 10 months ago | link
cached 4 months ago
"The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell"
32 points by jbellis 3 months ago | link | parent | top
cached 3 months ago
I was sitting next to Reg Braithwaite at the first startup school when one speaker (pg?) said something about startups being for young people so they can focus 100% on the company without worrying about kids. Reg stood up and said, paraphrased, "I'm starting a company _because_ of my kids, so they can say that their dad showed them how to follow their dreams instead of doing the safe thing like everyone else."

Respect.

My oldest is 7 now, and I hope he'll be able to say that his father showed him that living with a clear conscience is worth even more than a top-notch education.

"Looking into the future with Cassandra"
30 points by jbellis 10 months ago | link | parent | top
cached 4 months ago
Cassandra gives you two benefits.

First, Cassandra uses a disk layout similar to the one described in the Bigtable paper (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html sections 5.3 and 5.4); in particular it does no random writes. Relational databases like mysql pretty much all use btree-based storage which was great 20 years ago but is terrible today when seeks are your bottleneck.

I was talking to some people today who are struggling to get mysql to do ~100 insert/update operations per second. Cassandra will easily give you 10x that -- _per node_.

The second benefit is that Cassandra gives you real, scalable partitioning, invisible to the app, for when you do need to add nodes. When you have more than a handful of machines, not having to babysit replication + partitioning is a huge, huge deal.

Availability and partition tolerance explained and diagrammed (atyp.us)
29 points by jbellis 4 months ago | link
cached 4 months ago
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