PUBLIC MARKS with tags database & bigtable

Developing Flowdock, a real-time environment allowing teams to work together seamlessly, we needed a database able to scale horizontally for huge amount of write operations. Cassandra’s data model and performance characteristics made it a perfect fit for our needs.

A couple of good things to remember here: #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse. #2 is to understand that not all API’s are created equal. Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another. Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table. Don’t just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

What, a performance regression? But we threw more memory at it!! How can that be!

Memcached is not a cure all.

Riak combines a decentralized key-value store, a flexible map/reduce engine, and a friendly HTTP/JSON query interface to provide a database ideally suited for Web applications.