Relational databases are the bomb. It makes handling your storage fast, easy and stable. Pretty much if you have a database as part of your website, and you aren’t eBay, then your data is most likely stored in some sort of relational database. Basically it works like this: Each piece of data is stored in a different database table. When we need to look up data, we can look up how many pieces of data belong to a category, or look every piece of data sorting by category name, or whatever. It’s pretty ingenious, and has been the standard for many, many years.
As of late, some big websites have been going against the flow and have started implementing NoSQL systems. These are basically databases that are set up in extremely simple structures. XML databases and key/pair systems are driving some of the most frequently visited websites. It’s interesting seeing where the future of databases is headed, especially in the online realm. So far, the most interesting sounding NoSQL solution to me is Cassandra (and not only because it shares it’s name with the hot chick from Wayne’s World). It runs some of the largest websites including Digg, FaceBook and Twitter. It’s open source, under the Apache license, and was made that way in 2008.
To learn more about NoSQL, check out the wikipedia page, and this great article. If you wanna get really nerdy, check this page out and read up on all the different NoSQL solutions the web has to offer.
Tags: database, Open Source, web
