Sep 1, 2008

Continuent Community Site for Database Scale-Out

Our goal at Continuent is to be the go-to guys for database scale-out. Last Thursday we opened up a new community site for scale-out software at http://community.continuent.com. The site is driven by Joomla and has a number of very nice additions like Fireboard Forums and Mediawikis for each project. The first day or two was a bit bumpy as we nailed down some final issues, but most features are now working. We hope the result will be a nice place to meet other people who are interested in database scale-out and share ideas as well as software.

As you will see when visiting the community site, we have a variety of projects that we collectively call the Tungsten Scale-Out Stack. We have had this idea for a while now that it's not enough to have just one or two singing and dancing products--that's too narrow to solve scale-out problems. Instead you want a set of technologies that combine to create a wide variety of solutions.

Our effort last week included posting initial code for the Tungsten Replicator. We are actively testing, fixing bugs, and adding more features. However, there are a number of other projects on the site. I will talk about them on this blog in the future as each one is quite interesting.

Meanwhile, if you have a project that you might like to post on our site, let me know. We are actively looking for scale-out technology for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and commercial databases like Oracle. Just post on the end of this blog and I will see it.

2 comments:

Greg Smith said...

I think you should have a more prominent basic introduction to the terminology and alternatives to what you're putting together available. As an example, there's a great into article to just exactly what "scale-out" means and how that tends to be done in both Oracle and MySQL at scale-out vs scale-up.

You should do something like that together for your community site, just to provide more context. Even "scale-out" is still not so popular of a term yet for talking about database architectures.

Robert Hodges said...

Hi Greg,

That's an excellent idea. We need to make this information more accessible on the site. Thanks for visiting and providing feedback!!

Cheers, Robert

p.s., Any projects to contribute? ;)