Recommend Comet - An Example of the New Key-Code Databases (Email)

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Comet is an active distributed key-value store built at the University of Washington. The paper describing Comet is Comet: An active distributed key-value store, there are also slides, and a MP3 of a presentation given at OSDI '10. Here's a succinct overview of Comet:

Today's cloud storage services, such as Amazon S3 or peer-to-peer DHTs, are highly inflexible and impose a variety of constraints on their clients: specific replication and consistency schemes, fixed data timeouts, limited logging, etc. We witnessed such inflexibility first-hand as part of our Vanish work, where we used a DHT to store encryption keys temporarily. To address this issue, we built Comet, an extensible storage service that allows clients to inject snippets of code that control their data's behavior inside the storage service.

I found this paper quite interesting because it takes the initial steps of collocating code with a key-value store, which turns it into what might called a key-code store. This is something I've been exploring as a way of moving behavior to data in order to overcome network limitations in the cloud and provide other benefits. An innovator in this area is the Alchemy Database, which has already combined Redis and Lua. A good platform for this sort of thing might be Node.js integrated with V8. This would allow complex Javascript programs to run in an efficient evented container. There are a lot of implications of this sort of architecture, more about that later, but the Comet paper describes a very interesting start.

From the abstract and conclusion:


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