Monday, June 11, 2012 at 9:12AM If you understand things best when they're formatted as a musical, this video is for you. It teaches the essentials of PostgreSQL, Riak, HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB, Neo4J and Redis in the style of My Fair Lady. And for a change, it's very SFW.
Friday, December 23, 2011 at 8:58AM Storage: everyone wants it, but nobody wants to pay for it. This is one of those funny cartoons showing the doom of that sort of thinking...pay me now or cry over lost data later.
Loved: Where is my data? I’m kinda big deal after all! I should have listened to my postdoc, he can build cheaper storage than you can. I should have went to Newegg.
Found via Joe Landman and James Cuff. Joe talks about how RAID isn't backup and has some more wit and wisdom.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 4:14PM 
Jumping around the social mediasphere, it's not uncommon to feel the heat generated in praise of a favorite this or that over all the clearly inferior alternatives. Whilst human nature may never cool, I think Old Will had some insight worth considering the next time a flame threatens to flicker forth:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
Sunday, September 5, 2010 at 9:47AM This is so funny I laughed until I cried! Definitely NSFW. OMG it's hilarious, but it's also not a bad overview of the issues. Especially loved: You read the latest post on HighScalability.com and think you are a f*cking Google and architect and parrot slogans like Web Scale and Sharding but you have no idea what the f*ck you are talking about. There are so many more gems like that.
Thanks to Alex Popescu for posting this on MongoDB is Web Scale. Whoever made this deserves a Webby.
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 11:58AM Another fun one... Should I be Worried About Scaling?
What happens when the comfortable SQL world of yesterday changes out from under you? You feel like this (it uses some language picante so be advised):
Here's a link to the source: http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png
A great way to communicate the dislocation one feels when technology changes. It also gets you to wonder if those changes at the user level are completely necessary for carrying out the task?
Lest you think this just an old guard reactionary sentiment, Boxed Ice chose MongoDB over CouchDB partly because "CouchDB requires map/reduce style queries which is much more complicated to work with."
Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 9:41AM Jurgen Appelo of Noop.nl asked for nominations for top blogs and then performed a sophisticated weighting of their popularity based on page range, trust authority, Alexa rank, Google hits, and number of comments. When all the results poured out of the blender HighScalability was ranked 16th. Not bad! Joel on Software was number one, of course. The next few were: 2) Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood 3) Seth's Blog by Seth Godin and 4) Paul Graham: Essays Paul Graham. All excellent blogs. Very cool.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 1:46AM This article on scaling cookie baking recipes showed up in one my key word alerts. Lots of weird things show up in alerts, but I really like cookies and the parallels were just so delicious. Scaling in the cookie baking world is: the process of multiplying your recipe by many times to produce much more dough for many more cookies. It’s the difference between making enough dough in one batch to make two dozen cookies, or 2000 cookies. Hey, pretty close to the website notion. Yet as any good cook knows any scaled up recipe must be tweaked a little as things change at scale. Let's see what else we're supposed to do (quoted from the article):
