Calling all Rubyists - Ripple has Arrived!

February 11, 2010 at 11:30 AM | categories: Riak, Ruby, Map/Reduce, NoSQL

The Basho Dev. Team has been very excited about working with the Ruby community for some time. The only problem was we were heads down on so many other projects that it was hard to make any progress. But, even with all that work on our plate, we were committed to showing some love to Rubyists and their frameworks.

Enter Sean Cribbs. As Sean details in his latest blog post, "You Got your Riak in my Ruby," Basho and the stellar team at Sonian made it possible for him to hack on Ripple, a one-of-a-kind client library and object mapper for Riak. The full feature set for Ripple can be found on Sean's blog, but highlights include a DataMapper-like API, an easy builder-style interface to Map/Reduce, and near-term integration with Rails 3.

And, in case you need any convincing that you should consider Riak as the primary datastore for your next Rails app, check out Sean's earlier post, "Why Riak should power your next Rails app."

So, if you've read enough and want to get your hands on Ripple, go check it out on GitHub.

If you don't have Riak downloaded and built yet, get on it.

Lastly, you are going to be seeing a lot more Riak in your Ruby. So stay tuned because we have some big plans.

Best,

Mark

Basho Podcast Two - An Introduction to erlang_js

January 19, 2010 at 09:10 AM | categories: Riak, Map/Reduce, NoSQL, Database, JavaScript, erlang_js, Scaling, Podcast

Check out the new Basho podcast featuring Kevin Smith and Bryan Fink that discusses erlang_js, a simple and easy-to-use binding between Erlang and JavaScript. It is packaged as an OTP application so developers can easily embed Javascript inside their own applications.

Once you are done with the podcast, go download erlang_js.

Enjoy,

Mark Phillips



Right click here to download the Podcast

Riak Screencasts and Presentations - The Collected Works

December 28, 2009 at 03:45 PM | categories: NoSQL, Riak, Resources, Screencast, Database

To date, there have been a number of screencasts and presentations done on Riak and Riak-related technologies. As a belated holiday gift (we were coding, not blogging), we thought it would be a valuable resource if we assembled all of them in an easy-to-peruse list here on the Basho Blog. If we missed any, please let us know in the comments.

Go forth and consume!

Mark


Don't look to Big Money to fund innovation. Innovators must look to each other.

December 09, 2009 at 10:10 AM | categories: Startups, Riak, NoSQL, Database

One thing that the last year has taught us is that innovation will not be constrained by an economy in the doldrums. People have big ideas and big ideas play, no matter the economy.

Ever since we started talking to select companies about Riak in early 2009, we have been overwhelmed by the creative ideas for how to put a distributed data store into production.

Flash-based ad serving, real-time search, network analytics, and single-source/multi-lingual content are just a few examples of applications that are, or have the potential to start, transforming their existing economies.

We have had a unique view into emerging ideas and we are convinced of one thing: if these companies want to use Riak, who cares how much they can pay now? Their ideas are big and they will make us better. Many are already pounding the heck out of Riak, which, not coincidentally, means their businesses are taking off.

So that is the real reason why Riak EnterpriseDS for Startups came about. Whether or not any of these companies become the next Comscore or Doubleclick doesn't matter. Cedexis, Teleskele, even a few stealth startups -- these people are smart and driven and their ideas are big. They push Riak to its limits and make us better.

The economics of the Riak EnterpriseDS for Startups program are in the end quite simple: we give you code, you push us to be better. If you like us, we ask that you share that opinion. If not, say what you will. We deserve it. But either way, we will do our damnedest to make sure you get the best code and the best support we can deliver.

Why? Because we know what it is like to passionately believe in an idea and find folks like Bob and Jameson at Mochi Media, Marty at Cedexis, Gohkan at Teleskele, and Tom Fredell who believe in us.

Don't look to Big Money to fund innovation nowadays. Big Money is scared. Look to other innovators and entrepreneurs. Look to each other.

Let us know if we can help.

Earl

NoSQL No Niche

December 02, 2009 at 03:29 PM | categories: NoSQL, Database, Scalability, Analytics, Distributed Systems, Riak, Fault Tolerance

In the last two weeks, Basho has been fortunate to sign up some pretty cool clients. Considering we are a young company, that a database is among the stickiest pieces of software and therefore decisions to deploy something new are undertaken with caution, and that we have spent approximately $7,000 on marketing (mostly on sponsorship of a single event), the fact we are getting ten leads a week and converting leads to customers seems pretty amazing.

While this obviously puts the lie to the idea that the market for NoSQL is too early to build a business on, one thing is certain: what people want from NoSQL varies from significantly from client to client.

Some want high availability (especially write-availability) and scalability. Some want distributed analytical capabilities and low latency on queries of big data sets. Some want both. All of the people we are talking to have specific applications in mind and all of them are interested in using NoSQL to do something they really could not do before.

This is the proverbial "greenfield" for NoSQL. Not verticals (and especially not social networking, which is over-represented in examples because two of the great early NoSQL data stores were developed by Facebook and LinkedIn), but pent up demand is where we see growth and opportunity.

Some investors and product types worry this means there is no specific niche NoSQL fills, meaning the market is small and making it hard for small companies to thrive. While I happen to agree with the premise (there is no specific niche), I view that as an indicator of the potentially massive size of the opportunity. We are seeing pent up demand from companies that want to build web applications that are more reliable, scale better, use distributed map/reduce and indexing features, and run in data centers across continents.

No niche there.

Best,

Tony Falco

Justin Sheehy's Presentation at NoSQL East Now Available for Viewing

November 18, 2009 at 09:30 AM | categories: NoSQL, Ops, Database, Scalability, Distributed Systems, Riak, Fault Tolerance

Thanks to the hardwork of Brad Anderson and the rest of the NoSQL East organizers, Justin Sheehy's presentation is now online and ready to be consumed. You can check it out here: http://bit.ly/2wDhWs

Justin spends a little time discussing Riak and then quickly moves on to a discussion of first principles.

Justin's presentation stands on its own but it is worth pointing out: terms like "scalable" and "distributed" and "fault tolerant" are not marketing terms. Applied rigorously, the principles underlying them (a hat tip to folks like Brewer, Lewin/Leighton/Karger et. al.) lead to game-changing software.

Building truly decentralized systems requires discipline. Shortcuts for premature optimization ultimately lead to a dead end.

Enjoy,

Tony Falco

Soap people have to grow up quick:Two Weeks in the Life of a NoSQL Company

November 10, 2009 at 12:00 PM | categories: Developers, Operations, Riak, NoSQL, Database

Things are moving incredibly fast in the NoSQL space. I am used to internet-fast -- helping bring on 300 customers in a year at Akamai; going from adult bulletin boards and leased lines to hosting sites for twenty percent of the Fortune 500 at Digex (Verizon Business) in eighteen months. I have never seen a space explode like the NoSQL space.

Two weeks ago, Justin Sheehy stood on stage delivering a rousing and thoughtful presentation to the NoSQL East Conference that was less about Riak and more about a definition of first principles that underpinned Riak: what it REALLY means when you claim such terms as scalability (it doesn't mean buying a bigger machine for your master DB) and fault-tolerance (it has to apply to writes and reads and is binary; you either always accept writes and serve reads or you don't). The conference was a bit of a coming out party for Basho, which co-sponsored the event with Rackspace, Georgia Tech, and a host of other companies. We had been working on Riak for 18 months or so in relative quiet and it was nice to finally see what people thought, first hand.

There were equally interesting presentations about Pig and MongoDB and a host of other NoSQL entrants, all of which will make for engrossing viewing when they finally get posted. We were told this wasn't quite as exciting as the NoSQL conference out West but none of us seemed to mind. Home Depot, Turner Broadcasting, Weather.com, and Comcast had all sent folks down to evaluate the technology for real, live problems and the enthusiasm in the auditorium spilled out into the Atlanta bars. Business cards were exchanged, calls set up, even a little business discussed. Clearly, NoSQL databases were maturing fast.

No sooner had we returned to Cambridge than news of Flybridge's investment in 10Gen came out. Hooray! Someone was willing to bet a $3.4 million dollars on a company in the space. Chip Hazard, ever affable, wrote a nice blog post explaining the investment. According to him, every developer they talked to had downloaded some NoSQL database to test. Brilliant news. He said Flybridge invested in 10Gen because they liked the space and knew the team from their investment in Doubleclick, from whose loins the management team at 10Gen issued. No more felicitous reason exists for a group of persons to invest $3.4 million than that previous investments in the same team were handsomely rewarded. I would wish Chip and 10Gen the best if I had time.

Because contemporaneous with the news of Flybridge's investment, and almost as if the world had decided NoSQL's time had come, we began to field emails and calls from interested parties. Trials, quotes, lengthy discussions about features and uses of Riak -- the week was a blur. Everyone was conducting a bakeoff: "I have a 4TB database and customers in three continents. I am evaluating Riak and two other document datastores. Tell me about your OLAP features."

Heady times and, frankly, of somewhat dubious promise, if you ask me. Potential clients that materialize so quickly always seem to disappear just as fast. Really embracing a new technology requires trials, tests, new features, and time. Time most off all. These "bluebirds" would fly away in no time, if my experience held true.

Except, this time it didn't happen. Contracts were exchanged. Pen nibs were sharpened. It is as if the entire world decided to not wait for the everyone else to jump on the bandwagon and instead, decided to go NoSQL. Even using this last week as the sole example, I think the reason is plain -- people have real pain and suddenly the word is out that they no longer have to suffer.

Devs are constrained by what they can build, rich features notwithstanding. Ask the company that had to choose between Riak and a $100K in-memory appliance to scale. And Ops is getting slaughtered -- the cost of scaling poorly (and by poorly I mean pagers going off during dinner, bulk updates taking hours and failing all the time, fragmented and unmanageable indices consuming dozens of machines) is beginning to look like the cost of antiquated technology. Good Ops people are not fools. They look for ways to make life easier. Make no mistake -- all the Devs and Ops folks came with a set of tough questions and a list of new features. They also came with an understanding that companies that release open source software still have a business to run. They are willing to spend on a real company. In fact, having a business behind Riak ended up mattering as much as any features.

So, I suspect, we are at the proverbial "end of the beginning." Smart people in the NoSQL movement have succeeded in building convincingly good software and then explaining the virtues convincingly (all but one of the presentations at NoSQL East demonstrated the virtues of the respective approaches). Now these people are connecting to smart people responsible for building and running web apps, people who are decidedly unwilling to sit around hoping for Oracle or IBM to solve their problems.

In the new phase -- which we will cleverly call the "beginning of the middle" -- great tech will matter even more than it does now. It won't be about selling or marketing or any of that. If our numbers are any indication of a larger trend, more people will download and install NoSQL databases in the next month than the combined total of the three months previous. More people in a buying frame of mind will evaluate NoSQL technology not in terms of its coolness but in terms of its ability to solve their real, often expensive problems. The next phase will be rigorous in a way this phase was not. People have created several entirely new ways to store and distribute data. That was the easy part.

Just as much as great tech, the people behind it will matter. That means more calls between us and Dev teams. That means more feature requests considered and, possibly, judiciously, agreed to.

That also means lots of questions answered. People care about support. They care about whether you answer their emails in a timely fashion and are polite. People want to do business with NoSQL. They want to spend money to solve problems. They need to know they are spending it with responsible, responsive, dedicated people.

Earl tweets about it all the time and I happen to agree: any NoSQL success helps all NoSQL players. I also happen to feel that any failure hurts all NoSQL players. As NoSQL rapidly ages into its adolescence, it will either be awkward and painful or exciting and characterized by incredible growth.

When I was a kid on the Navy base in Alameda, my babysitter watched soaps all afternoon, leaving me mostly to my own devices. If I stopped in, I always got roped in to hearing her explain her favorite stories. Most of all she loved how ridiculous they were, though she would never admit this exactly. Instead, adopting an attitude of gleeful incredulity, she would point out this or that attractive young actor and tell me how just a year ago, she was a little baby. "Soap people have to grow up quick, I guess," was her single (and to her, completely satisfactory) explanation. "If they don't, they get written out of the story."

Indeed.

Best,

Tony Falco

If You Happen to Find Yourself in Stockholm...

November 09, 2009 at 12:22 PM | categories: Riak, Erlang, Nitrogen, NoSQL

Then make sure to check out Basho's very own Rusty Klophaus, who will be opening up the Erlang User Conference, slated to kick-off November 12th.

Rusty will be giving a brief overview of both Nitrogen and Riak, and then plans to describe common patterns and practices of Nitrogen and Riak development against the background of a sample application that allows a presenter to share and control a slideshow over the internet. In short, his presentation is not to be missed. (Official abstract can be found here.)

So, if you find yourself in Sweden this Thursday, make sure to show your face at the Astoria on Nybrogatan in Stockholm, and show your support for Erlang, Riak, Nitrogen and, most-importantly, Rusty.

Riak On,

Mark Phillips

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