Presentation: "Real World Web-Scale Information Retrieval"

Track: WEB-SCALE DATA: NOSQL / Time: Wednesday 14:45 - 15:45 / Location: Store Sal, Musikhuset

This talk will explore the real world technical challenges we faced at SimpleGeo while building a web-scale spatial database on top of Apache Cassandra. Cassandra offers operational simplicity, decentralized operations, no single points of failure, online load balancing and re-balancing, and near-linear horizontal scalability. Unfortunately, Cassandra fell far short of providing the sort of sophisticated spatial queries we needed. Our challenge was to bridge the gap without compromising any of the desirable qualities that led us to choose Cassandra in the first place. The result is a robust general purpose mechanism for overlaying sophisticated data structures on top of distributed hash tables. We continue to improve and evolve the system, but we’re eager to share what we’ve learned so far.

Keywords: NoSQL, Non-relational database, database, Cassandra, Scalability

Target audience: Developers who are familiar with non-relational database technologies are are interested in learning how they are currently being used in real world systems.

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Mike Malone, SimpleGeo

Mike Malone

Biography: Mike Malone

Mike Malone is an infrastructure engineer at SimpleGeo where he works on building and integrating scalable systems that power the company’s location platform. Since joining SimpleGeo, Mike has been working to ensure operational continuity in the face of rapid growth, partial system failures, and traffic bursts. Recently, he's been working on building an efficient multi-dimensional complex query overlay on top of an eventually consistent distributed hash table. Before joining SimpleGeo, Mike helped build the microblogging web site Pownce, where he learned a lot about the technical and social difficulties of scaling an online community. After Pownce’s acquisition by Six Apart in 2008, Mike worked on the TypePad platform team, where he gained a great deal of experience building RESTful web services. In his spare time Mike enjoys tinkering with new technologies. When he’s not on the computer, you can probably find him hanging out with his girlfriend, Katie, and their friends at a good bar.

Software Passion: Building large scale distributed systems.

Links:
Twitter: @mjmalone
Blog: http://immike.net/