Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 7:40AM 
While exploring deep into some dusty old library stacks, I dug up Nostradamus' long lost NoSQL codex. What are the chances? Strangely, it also gave the plot to the next Dan Brown novel, but I left that out for reasons of sanity. About NoSQL, here is what Nosty (his friends call him Nosty) predicted are the signs you may need a NoSQL database...
Monday, February 15, 2010 at 12:54PM Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are raising VC money for StackOverflow. This is interesting for three reasons: 1) Joel has always seemed like a keep it small and grow organically type of guy, so this is a big step in a different direction. 2) It means they think there's a very big market in the Q&A space and they mean to capture as much as the market as possible. 3) Most importantly for this blog, Joel gives some good advice on when to stay fresh and local and when it's time to jump for the brass ring, scale up your ambition, and go for VC money. Please see Joel's blog post for the details, but here's when to go VC:
Monday, February 15, 2010 at 7:11AM 
This is an excerpt from my article Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing in the Ambient Cloud.
Earlier we talked about how a single botnet could harness more compute power than our largest super computers. Well, that's just the start of it. The amount of computer power available to the Ambient Cloud will be truly astounding.
Friday, February 12, 2010 at 8:20AM Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 7:02AM ElasticSearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine built on top of Lucene. Its features include:
Monday, February 8, 2010 at 8:04AM Several readers had follow-up questions in response to this article. Luke's responses can be found in How FarmVille Scales - The Follow-up.
If real farming was as comforting as it is in Zynga's mega-hit Farmville then my family would have probably never left those harsh North Dakota winters. None of the scary bedtime stories my Grandma used to tell about farming are true in FarmVille. Farmers make money, plants grow, and animals never visit the red barn. I guess it's just that keep-your-shoes-clean back-to-the-land charm that has helped make FarmVille the "largest game in the world" in such an astonishingly short time.
How did FarmVille scale a web application to handle 75 million players a month? Fortunately FarmVille's Luke Rajlich has agreed to let us in on a few their challenges and secrets. Here's what Luke has to say...
Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 9:56AM CNBC, like many large web sites, relied on a CDN for content delivery. Recently, we started looking to see if we could improve this model. Our criteria was:
- improve response time
- have better control over traffic (real time reporting, change management and alerting)
- better utilize internal datacenters and their infrastructure
- shield users from any troubles at the origin infrastructure
- cost out
Friday, February 5, 2010 at 8:55AM One important high availability principle is concurrency control. The idea is to allow only that much traffic through to your system which your system can handle successfully. For example: if your system is certified to handle a concurrency of 100 then the 101st request should either timeout, be asked to try later or wait until one of the previous 100 requests finish. The 101st request should not be allowed to negatively impact the experience of the other 100 users. Only the 101st request should be impacted. Read more here...
Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7:38AM Lots of cool stuff happening this week...
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 8:19AM Morgan Tocker has an awesome article and comment thread in the MySQL Performance Blog about When should you store serialized objects in the database? Before the NoSQL age is was very common to simulate schemalessness by storing blobs in MySQL. Sharding was implemented by running multiple MySQL instances and spreading writes across them. While not ideal for the purpose, developers felt comfortable with MySQL. They knew how to install it, back it up, replicate it, in short: they knew how to make it work. Yet they also needed to store objects without the penalty of joins. Searches and aggregate queries were handled by indexes kept in separate tables, this offloaded the fast path to objects.
This all made perfect sense. Usually we just want stuff to work and going with what you know is often the best path to that goal. And what we have known is MySQL. All the different pros and cons of this approach are covered wonderfully in the post.
But the world has changed.
