So I went to a NoSQLSummer meeting yesterday night. Upon entering the deathly empty MINC complex, I thought “startups never sleep?”, but I found most of Neo’s staff in a cosy war-room called “Innovation Lab”. No coffee, but soda bottles. Copies of the paper were spread around the large table.
We met. We hung out. And, walked through the *Dynamo paper*, which was released in 2007, and is quite self-contained. That makes it “a NoSQL classic”. Good paper with which to open a reading circle. Now we have some pre-understanding for upcoming papers.
Photo by kalavinka
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Neo4J’s Peter Neubauer, riffed on on Google’s data hugeness, which led us further afield: Google / Big Data; Crowdsourcing — WordNet; Concept: Discard 99% of the data, using the top 1%.
Thoughts on format
We’re currently toying with new/different perspectives/formats:
- “Developer Perspective”
- “Infrastructure/Scaling Perspective”
- “Arch. Perspective”
- “Apps/Ops Perspective”
Polyglot cases: How do you work with several multi-database setups?
Event bus usage: Some people use NoSQL stuff for the event buses. What are pros and cons here?
Do you need anything else there? I really enjoy this peek behind the scenes, implementation problems, etc. It is not something I can bring directly to my workplace and use, but I like the challenge of understanding large concepts together. The current format suits me well.a
Some hints and tips I picked up:
Google’s research end-of-level boss Peter Norvig’s talk at Berkeley (YouTube you-feel-lucky) — summarizing all the fields of research. (His official title is Director of Search Quality.)
A question: Is Stepanov’s Elements of Programming any good? Is it for me? (C++, math, beautiful type-setting.)
Next paper?
Google’s Bigtable? Cassandra? I cheated, and begun reading the Cassandra one. Let’s see how that goes.