High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Update: Aaron Worsham Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku. Aaron nicely sums up their goal: Heroku is looking to eliminate all the reasons companies have for not doing software projects.

Adam Wiggins of Heroku presented at the lollapalooza that was theCloud Computing Demo Night. The idea behind Heroku is that you upload a Rails application into Heroku and it automatically deploys into EC2 and it automatically scales using behind the scenes magic. They call this "liquid scaling." You just dump your code and go. You don't have to think about SVN, databases, mongrels, load balancing, or hosting. You just concentrate on building your application. Heroku's unique feature is their web based development environment that lets you develop applications completely from their control panel. Or you can stick with your own development environment and use their API and Git to move code in and out of their system.

For website developers this is as high up the stack as it gets. With Heroku we lose that "build your first lightsaber" moment marking the transition out of apprenticeship and into mastery. Upload your code and go isn't exactly a heroes journey, but it is damn effective...

Skype uses PostgreSQL as their backend database. PostgreSQL doesn't get enough run in the database world so I was excited to see how PostgreSQL is used "as the main DB for most of [Skype's] business needs." Their approach is to use a traditional stored procedure interface for accessing data and on top of that layer proxy servers which hash SQL requests to a set of database servers that actually carry out queries. The result is a horizontally partitioned system that they think will scale to handle 1 billion users.

The new version of a8cjdbc finished some limitations. Now Clobs and Blobs are supported, and some fixes using binary data. The version was also fully tested with Postgres and mySQL.

Since Version 1.3 there is also a free trail version for download available. Check it out and test yourself...

Take a look at: http://www.activ8.at/homepage/en/a8cjdbc.php

I've downloaded the latest version and setup a environment with one virtual database and two database backends.
I tried to make a "non real life szenario": The first backend was a Postgres node, the second was a mySQL node.
Everything works fine - failover - recoverylog, etc... with to different backend database types.

So check out the trial version and test yourself the clustered driver and give me some results about your experience with a8cjdbc.
As I only tested mySQL and Postgres (and the non real life szenario with two different backend types) - maybe someone else have experiences with out databases?

greetings
Wolfgang

The new version of a8cjdbc finished some limitations. Now Clobs and Blobs are supported, and some fixes using binary data. The version was also fully tested with Postgres and mySQL.

Since Version 1.3 there is also a free trail version for download available. Check it out and test yourself...

Take a look at: http://www.activ8.at/homepage/en/a8cjdbc.php

I've downloaded the latest version and setup a environment with one virtual database and two database backends.
I tried to make a "non real life szenario": The first backend was a Postgres node, the second was a mySQL node.
Everything works fine - failover - recoverylog, etc... with to different backend database types.

So check out the trial version and test yourself the clustered driver and give me some results about your experience with a8cjdbc.
As I only tested mySQL and Postgres (and the non real life szenario with two different backend types) - maybe someone else have experiences with out databases?

greetings
Wolfgang

Practically any software project nowadays could not survive without a database (DBMS) backend storing all the business data that is vital to you and/or your customers. When projects grow larger, the amount of data usually grows larger exponentially. So you start moving the DBMS to a separate server to gain more speed and capacity. Which is all good and healthy but you do not gain any extra safety for this business data. You might be backing up your database once a day so in case the database server crashes you don't lose EVERYTHING, but how much can you really afford to lose?

I was looking at the pingdom infrastructure matrix (http://royal.pingdom.com/royalfiles/0702_infrastructure_matrix.pdf) and I saw that no sites are using Postgresql, and then I searched through highscalability.com and saw very few mentions of postgresql. Are there any examples of high-traffic sites that use postgresql? Does anyone have any experience with it? I'm having trouble finding good, recent studies of postgres (and postgres compared w/ mysql) online.