Cassandra is a highly scalable NoSQL database solution. Jonathan Ellis demolishes some misconceptions about Cassandra with a look at its replication capabilities, reliability, and interoperability with Hadoop and similar tools.

A review of the various HA solutions available for MySQL.

Gizzard is a Scala framework that makes it easy to create custom fault-tolerant, distributed databases. At a high level, Gizzard is a middleware networking service that manages partitioning data across arbitrary backend datastores (e.g., SQL databases, Lucene, etc.). Nick Kallen from Twitter Engineering outlines what Gizzard is and how it works.

Handy notes and tips on squeezing more performance out of your MySQL server.

Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built over Hadoop. It provides tools to enable easy data ETL, a mechanism to put structures on the data, and the capability to querying and analysis of large data sets stored in Hadoop files.

David Mytton of BoxedIce explains how his MongoDB infrastructure works and gives some tips and tricks based on experience running MongoDB in production for several months.

SQL databases are fundamentally non-scalable, and there is no magical pixie dust that we, or anyone, can sprinkle on them to suddenly make them scale.

In this FutureRuby talk, Ilya Grigorik explores Tokyo Cabinet’s features such as the key-value store, ordered traversal, attribute search, schemaless data structures,indexing, and scripting with Lua.