Scaling SourceForge with MongoDB

NoSQL Landscape – Nosh Petigara, 10gen

As more web developers strive to make their applications scalable we see a shift away from the traditional LAMP stack towards technologies built with a focus on scaling. As part of this shift, a new approach to data storage for the web is needed – the traditional RDBMS are not suited to many of the problems that appear in large scale web applications. Fortunately, a large number of alternatives to the RDBMS have sprung up, each with different goals and approaches to the problem of scalability. Nosh will talk about the NoSQL landcape (key-value stores, document databases, map-reduce frameworks, and column-oriented databases), the advantages and disadvantages of these datastores, and how they are used today to solve real-world problems.

NoSQL at Geeknet – Rick Copeland, Geeknet

The Geeknet engineering team manages the sites SourceForge.net, Slashdot, freshmeat, and fossfor.us. Geeknet had been using relational databases (Postgres and MySQL) for a variety of things for a long time. But there are many situations where our needs for scalability, replication, and higher throughput, were not being well met by relational databases, and so Geeknet investigated a number of alliterative NoSQL’ data storage solutions. Geeknet’s tests led to MongoDB, a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database with a flexible query system. Mark will highlight the process Geeknet used to evaluate and select a NoSQL solution that was applicable to their business and technology requirements.

Building and Deploying a NoSQL Datastore Application with MongoDB – Rick Copeland, Geeknet

Geeknet rewrote the download pages on SourceForge.net, and the requirements were for high read performance, replication, and a way to easily do partial updates of large records. Basically Geeknet wanted a document store that would allow them to save all the data needed for a project page render in a single record.

• Rewriting the Sourceforge application to take advantage of MongoDB’s unique features
• Moving data from a relational to non-relational store
• Deployment architecture in use at Sourceforge
• Benefits and challenges
• Future plans