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.