Digg apparently has started using Cassandra (a structured key-value store) as an alternative to MySQL for some of their features. MySQL is pretty much the standard for a wide range of large SNS (including Facebook, Flickr, and Digg itself). As someone who’s done his fair-share of work scaling, federating, sharding, and doing other -ings to databases to speed up and optimize large amounts of data for web applications, it’s interesting to see where this experiment leads to.

note: Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook, released as open source in ‘08, and is now an apache incubator project. Don’t you just love the web?

Nature composed the music. This guy just wrote it down.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.