"For those familiar with memcached, membase provides on-the-wire protocol compatibility, but adds disk persistence; hierarchical storage management; data replication; live cluster reconfiguration and rebalancing; and secure multi-tenancy with data partitioning. Like memcached, membase is simple, fast and elastic."<p>I bet a lot of large sites using multiple memcached servers would find this interesting.
The timing for me is interesting as I was just about to start up a cassandra setup here. This might be a better fit for my particular needs if I could get it running. Unfortunately, I'm having a difficult time figuring out where to start. A general getting started guide would be very helpful.<p>- The FAQ on membase.org is empty and the wiki does not appear to be populated with much content (i.e. 'Directions for working with the membase source and descriptions of the components in the source will be available soon').<p>- The google group does not appear to have significant content besides a 'Where's the ruby driver?' post.<p>- My work blocks IRC, so jumping on freenode isn't an option.<p>- I tried downloading from the northscale.com site, but for whatever reason I cannot enter the required fields on the download form (in Firefox 3.6.4).<p>- I downloaded the source, which is broken out into a number of directories - figuring out what the various subsystems are and what needs to be done is going to take some digging.
The key/value model embraced by NoSQL databases (Scalaris, Voldemort, Tokyo Cabinet, etc) is the simplest and easiest to implement but inefficient when you are only interested in querying or updating part of a value.<p>This article (<a href="http://seattleweb.intel-research.net/people/lamarca/pubs/paper-ChaRam.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://seattleweb.intel-research.net/people/lamarca/pubs/pap...</a>) coming out of Intel argues that it is also difficult to implement more sophisticated structures on top of a distributed key/value. The author's main point is that a few specialized applications can and have been built on a plain distributed key/value store, but most applications have ended up having to customize the key/value store's internals to achieve their functional or performance goals.<p>From the little bit I have read about Membase it looks well positioned to bring simple distributed key/values stores to the next level and back into the lime light.
Had not the time to search through the codebase, but the source include 10 folders, a sysadmin's hell, some with software in C, some with software in C++ and some with python code, one of them is a folder named 'mencached'.
* there are alternatives but the backers give this project one up. * web site needs a significant overhaul. * this was a commercial product, if i am not mistaken, and just recently opened up. * is this forked off memcached or just another NoSQL with memcached compatibility is still a mystery.
It's unfortunate there are no Windows binaries (well apparently there are no binaries yet period, but I mean they don't plan on binaries until some time out). We could host Linux VMs, but ideally we just run Windows binaries and get rid of the abstraction.<p>That is the case for a large number of these products. At best offering a terrible Cygwin port. In the Windows world the premiere product right now is the beta of AppFabric, but almost no one uses that and it has an absurd list of dependencies that preclude many uses.