MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.8

Last weekend I tweeted two links to two tweets by a poor guy who apparently got his MongoDB database into an unrecoverable state during shutdown whilst upgrading to a newer version. That tweet quickly made the rounds, and the next morning I saw myself staring at replies stating that it was all his fault, because he 1.) used kill -9 to shut it down because apparently the process hung (my guess is it was in the middle of flushing all data to disk) and 2.) didn’t have a slave, just one database instance.

The Virtues of Monitoring

Over the last year I haven’t only grown very fond of coffee, but also of infrastructure. Working on Scalarium has been a fun ride so far, for all kinds of reasons, one of them is dealing so much with infrastructure. Being an infrastructure platform provider, what can you do, right?

Why Riak Search Matters…

The awesome dudes at Basho released Riak 0.13 and with it their first version of Riak Search yesterday. This is all kinds of exciting, and I’ll tell you why. Riak Search is (way down below) based on Lucene, both the library and the query interface. It mimicks the Solr web API for querying and indexing. Just like you’d expect something coming out of Basho, you can add and remove nodes at any time, scaling up and down as you go. I’ve seen an introduction on the basics back at Berlin Buzzwords, and it was already shaping up to be nothing but impressive. But enough with all the praise, why’s this stuff exciting?

Be Humble, and Get Shit Done!

I had the honor of speaking at JAOO, sorry GOTO, this year. Being part of so many great speakers, like James Gosling, Rich Hickey, Martin Fowler, Tim Bray, Michael Nygard, and Dan Ingalls (maker of several Smalltalk versions), made me feel nothing but humble, but not in a bad way. I talked about CouchDB, and if you care for it, check out my slides. This is my take away from the conference.