Graphd is another good example of the log-oriented append only pattern. This is the sort of stuff I’ve been thinking about for a bit, and wishing I had more time to play with. Disks and disk metaphors might turn out to be our most dramatically parallelizable constructs.

Still my favorite hack is that, because they’re building a wiki-like tool, Freebase can bubble their eventual consistency implementation all the way up to the end-users, who are mentally prepared to deal with write contentions (they’re already dealing with rightness contention after all). We’re living in a post-ACID world.

The only down side is everyone I’ve talked to at Freebase seems pretty solid on this being their proprietary secret sauce, because a good, fast scalable open source tuple store might actually jump start a real semantic (small-S) web after all these years.

Oh, and only tangentially related, Myles published a good high level on our job queue system last Friday.

Also contrary to TC’s breathy article BigTable is not much like SimpleDB (other then they’re both ways of storing and retrieving data which aren’t MySQL) in that it doesn’t give you querying, just limited range scans on rows, and it seems to be really really expensive to add new columns (at least whenever I talk to Gengineers, they seem to flinch at the concept)

Meanwhile I’m still waiting on DevPay for SimpleDB, before I get into it in a big big way.