Hot Scalability Links for March 3, 2010

• Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn't-Scalable Lie by Dennis Forbes. Buoyed by Canada's Olympic success, Dennis is going for the gold in that least real of sports, the NoSQL vs SQL pursuit.
• Design Patterns for Distributed Non-Relational Databases by Todd Lipcon. Great coverage of consistent hashing, consitency models, data models, storage layouts, log-structured merge trees, and gossip protocols.
• Brewer's CAP Conjecture is False. Jim Starkey makes the case the CAP is crap. 
• Kaazing Pushes Web Sockets to Make Browsers Real Time. Bi-directional communication comes to the web, but shouldn't sockets be able to accept connections too?
• 4 Months with Cassandra, a love story. Cloudkick likes its Linear scalability, Massive write performance, Low operational costs. We'll likely keep moving more data into Cassandra as we need to, but for some data the ability to write arbitrary SQL queries is still very useful. 
• CS 525: Advanced Distributed Systems. A very thorough list of papers on distributed systems. Have fun exploring. Sounds like a great class.
• Distributed Programming and Data Consistency w/ Notes by Paulo Gaspar. Explores consistency in an informative and entertaining way. Covers CAP, HA,  Eventual Consistency, Caching, Vector Clocks, Dynamo, NoSQL and which approaches apply to which type of systems. Excellent.
• AppEngine and Resource Performance: Why you need a CDN by  Damon Oehlman. You will see some posts around the web suggesting how you can use AppEngine like a Content Delivery Network – just ignore them, they are just being silly. There is nothing CDN like AppEngine at all (at least not at the moment). It’s a great service and I love it, but my understanding is that there are two datacentre’s serving AppEngine applications – a primary and a backup, not a globally distributed network of edge servers.
• Royans Scalability links for Feb 28th 2010
• Open source helps Facebook achieve massive app scalability by Rodney Gedda. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.
• I love eventual consistency but... by James Hamilton. What I’ve learned over the years is that strong consistency, if done well, can scale to very high levels. The trick is implementing it well.

Announcements

• Glue Conference. At Glue, we'll explore the new technologies that are forming around web applications in a post-cloud world. At Glue, we'll aim to explore things like: APIs and Protocols, Languages/Frameworks, Formats/Standards, Open Data, Platforms/Providers, Storage, Identity.
• Neo4j 1.0 Released. After 10 years of development and 7 years of 24/7 production, the open source nosql graph database Neo4j has finally been released as 1.0. Congratulations!