SSD Primer and SandForce Controller

If you're new to SSDs or just want a fantastic in-depth review of the technology along with real-world testing, check out this anandtech.com article. If you're looking for a more recent analysis of SSD products, checkout this March article, also from anandtech.com.

The SandForce controller has been getting a lot of press lately, following on the heels of the Indilinx controller. Here's a review of a new Corsair SSD with the SandForce controller.

The SandForce controller takes a different approach than other SSD controllers and has introduced deduplication and the RAID concept to NAND cells. They call their RAID approach RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements). Checkout more here.

nosql:eu conference (April 20-22) looks very interesting

I'm really looking forward to some of the slides and posts from the upcoming nosql conference in London.

The agenda is a drool-fest for any scalable KVP/metadata geek. I like how most of the talks are centered on real-world use of various technologies (Cassandra, CouchDB, Dynamo, HBase, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak, etc.).

Here's a copy of the agenda:

Tuesday April 20
08.30	- Registration, Coffe and Mingle
09.30	- The Guardian's use of NoSQL - Matthew Wall, The Guardian
10.30	- Coffee break and mingle
10.50	- An overview of NoSQL - Alex Popescu, MyNoSQL
11.50	- Lunch break and mingle
13.00	- Key-value stores and Riak - Bryan Fink, Basho
14.00	- Coffee break and mingle
14.20	- Document-oriented databases and MongoDB - Mathias Stearn, 10gen
15.20	- Coffee break and mingle
15.40	- Column-oriented databases and Cassandra - Jonathan Ellis , Rackspace
16.40	- Coffee break and mingle
17.00	- Graph databases and Neo4j - Emil Eifrem, Neo Technology
18.00	- Evening party with loads of beer and mingle
Wednesday April 21
08.30	- Coffee and mingle
09.30	- On the Birth of Dynamo - Werner Vogels, Amazon
10.30	- Coffee break and mingle
10.50	- Twitter's use of Cassandra, Pig and HBase - Kevin Weil, Twitter
11.50	- Lunch break and mingle
13.00	- CouchDB at the BBC - Enda Farrell, BBC
14.00	- Coffee break and mingle
14.20	- Why Big Enterprises are Interested in NoSQL - Jon Moore, Comcast
15.20	- Coffee break and mingle
15.40	- Memory as the New Disk: Why Redis Rocks - Tim Lossen, Wooga
15.55	- Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant and Kyoto Cabinet - Makoto Inoue
16.10	- Thomas Kuhn Predicted the Fate of the Relational Database - Neil Robbins
16.25	- Notes from the field: NoSQL tools in Production - Matthew Ford
16.40	- Coffee break and mingle
17.00	- Panel debate - Moderated by James Governor, RedMonk
Thursday April 22
08.30	- Registration, Coffee and Mingle
09.00	- Morning workshops - Choose between:
	- MongoDB - Mathias Stearn, 10gen
	- Riak - Bryan Fink, Basho
12:30	- Lunch break and mingle
13:30	- Afternoon workshops - Choose between:
	- Redis - Simon Willison, The Guardian
	- Neo4j - Emil Eifrém, Neo Technology
17.00	- Thank you and see you next year!

NoSQL interview with the hstack.org folks

Another interesting interview with the hstack.org folks, this time from a NoSQL blog.