key-value store

Product: Lightcloud - Key-Value Database

Todd Hoff

— 1 min read
Lightcloud is a distributed and persistent key-value database from Plurk.com. Performance is said to be comparable to memcached. It's different than memcachedb because it scales out horizontally by adding new nodes. It's different than memcached because it persists to disk, it's not just a cache. Now you have one more option in the never ending quest to ditch the RDBMS.

Their website does a nice job explaining the system:

  • Built on Tokyo Tyrant. One of the fastest key-value databases [benchmark]. Tokyo Tyrant has been in development for many years and is used in production by Plurk.com, mixi.jp and scribd.com (to name a few)...
  • Great performance (comparable to memcached!)
  • Can store millions of keys on very few servers - tested in production
  • Scale out by just adding nodes
  • Nodes are replicated via master-master replication. Automatic failover and load balancing is supported from the start
  • Ability to script and extend using Lua. Included extensions are incr and a fixed list
  • Hot backups and restore: Take backups and restore servers without shutting them down
  • LightCloud manager can control nodes, take backups and give you a status on how your nodes are doing
  • Very small foot print (lightcloud client is around ~500 lines and manager about ~400)
  • Python only, but LightCloud should be easy to port to other languages

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