If you have looked over a number of my postings, you can tell that I enjoy playing around with noSQL databases but for this posting I wanted to look at something a bit lower level. LevelDB is a on-disk key/value store that is written by Google. It’s based on concepts from Google’s BigTable database system without sharing any of the code. You can think of LevelDB in the same way as something like SQLite.

As a developer I keep an eye on the noSQL space. I feel that noSQL truly empowers the developer to do more than using a relational database. They are typically easier to set up and to scale along with an ability to have a looser data structure which is able to evolve overtime. Don’t get me wrong, relational databases have their place and will continue to be used many years from now, but just like using a new language or framework, developers can get a boost from using noSQL databases without having the restraints that come along with using a relational database.

Riak is a database that I have read a good amount about but have not actually gone through fully taking the time to investigate it. (AKA playing with it!) What is Riak Riak is dynamo inspired database that is based off of Amazon’s white paper. As with a lot of NoSQL databases it’s easy to scale and it is fault-tolerant. Riak comes with a HTTP interface along with a Protocol Buffers interface.

One of the things that really gets me excited about my new job is being able to use new technology. Sure, sometimes new technology is risky but I see groups befitting more then failing due to using newer technology. As always when talking about new technology, NoSQL seems to come up because there are a good number of people switching parts (or all) of their application to use NoSQL databases to get by limits or to help with scalability issues.

Loggly is a great cloud service for managing log files from servers or many servers. It’s also an add-on for your Heroku hosted app. Loggly comes in different tiers from a free to monthly service based on how much data you store on Loggly servers. Being cheap, I have picked the free tier for amscotti.com as it’s not a mission critical app and I don’t have tons of logs. One of the coolest things I like about Loggly is they do ‘Log Archiving’ on Amazon’s S3 for you.

To keep with the previous posting I made with MongoDB, I am going to show some Ruby code of how to connect and push data in to your database. If you take a look at the MongoDB driver page you see that there are a good number of programming languages that are supported by MongoDB.org along with tons that are supported by the community. My languages of choice is Ruby. It’s a Supported language from MongoDB.

I’m a big fan of CouchDB. I enjoy how they go about doing things and how you are able to use it without the need of drivers as its all RESTful based. As long as your language of choice has the ability to make RESTful calls and read JSON data then you’re all set. But before I really started to use CouchDB I did start looking at MongoDB, another Document data store.

This has been a posting that I been putting off for some time now. noSQL is a great topic but the more you look in to it the more there is. noSQL covers a lot of technologies and ideas, some very new, and some that been around for a bit. I’m hoping this posting wets your appetite for knowing more about noSQL. One thing I will say to start off with, noSQL is a buzzword, plain and simple.

Haven’t blogged in some time so I wanted to give a quick update on the things I’m looking at for myself and work. Right now my group is coming to the end of a big project at work so a lot of my time has been going into that, but I’ve still been looking at some new things that I hope to later write postings about. Right now the first item on the top of my list is NodeJS, node is a way to build scaleable web applications by using just JavaScript.