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Big data in context

A few weeks back I attended venture firm Accel Partners' New Data Workshop event and learned quite a bit about the state of what we are now commonly referring to as "big data" and the challenges that await the vendors trying to target this new way of slicing and dicing vast amounts of information.

One of the big takeaways for me was the realization that even with all of the processing power available nowadays, the amount of data is growing at such a rapid pace that people are simply looking to cope with the problem, rather than facing it head on.

The issue of processing large amounts of data is not necessarily new--most developers and IT staff can tell you about having too much information to deal with--but, the big difference is that there are new approaches, tools and technologies that can help alleviate the difficult in processing.

Over the course of the last 30 years or so the way that machines process transactions has changed, but so too has the vast amount of data that is being processed and collected, now with an eye toward real-time analysis of information.

This has led to the advent of a number of technologies that allow for data processing to be offloaded and managed in both structured and unstructured ways--examples include open-source projects like Memcached and Hadoop as well as NoSQL data storage mechanisms like Cassandra.… Read more

NoSQL goes mobile with the help of CouchDB

If there is one aspect of mobility that has yet to live up to user expectations, it's the ability for data to be accessible in near real-time across multiple devices.

Despite all the advances in technology, including a wealth of Wi-Fi and 3G networks, many devices become impotent without an Internet connection.

This issue becomes even more apparent when you are dealing with browser-based applications and smartphones that don't have multithreading functionality to maintain state across applications and data stores.

I recently had the chance to chat with Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB and CEO of Couchio, … Read more

Apache Cassandra gets boost from Riptano (Q&A)

A new company called Riptano recently launched to provide support and services for the Apache Cassandra project, a nonrelational open-source database designed for high performance that has a strong presence in Web shops like Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. I recently had the chance to chat with Matt Pfeil, founder of Riptano, and he provided some insight into the project and the new world of NoSQL database approaches.

What exactly is Cassandra and who uses it? Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed, open source database. It's a top-level Apache project with committers from Riptano, Rackspace, Digg, Facebook, and others.

Cassandra … Read more