NoSQL Slides
NoSQL was a rip-roaring good time. It was fun to catch up with old friends as well as get an all day brain-dump of what's going on in the distributed database world. I'm pretty heads-down on CouchDB, so seeing how others have approached a similar problem space was eye opening.
Mostly I was amazed at the level of complexity in the various Big Table clones. My impression is that most of them blend storage concerns with distribution concerns. Mixing it all up in one big distributed porridge allows for optimizations that CouchDB's approach can't yield. However, I think the CouchDB approach of building a solid single-node implementation always with an eye toward distributed uses is just as viable as always.
Meebo's CouchDB-Lounge proxy is a pure HTTP approach to building CouchDB clusters that span multiple machines. It doesn't handle the dynamic nature of truly large clusters, where you can count on nodes continuously leaving and joining. But it makes up for that with a truly simple implementation (just a few hundred lines of Python and C). When the need arises, someone will have an easy time adding facilities for managing dynamic large clusters, because the separation of concerns is so clear.
Maybe I'm underestimating the necessary complexity in large cluster management, but so far betting on simplicity has been a winning strategy and I intend to continue it.