We’ve Been Busy
In the past few weeks, we’ve been busy experimenting with new technologies, in particular NoSQL databases. If you’re not familiar with them now, you will be during the next few years. In the meantime, take a look at Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, and Redis.
These databases tend to loosen the traditional RDBMS ACID properties in exchange for speed and scalability. You might not want to use this for billable transactions (or maybe you do, if you’re careful about it) but it could be ideal for managing other forms of data. Instead of tables, many NoSQL databases manage “documents” that can be thought of as key-value pairs or hash tables. Instead of defining a schema and forcing all records to fit that schema, you can add keys and values as you go. If you’re willing to forgo ACID transactions, replication becomes much, much easier.
If you think about what kinds of data must be managed by an ad platform, you’ll see that this approach fits quite naturally. Expect to hear more about it from us in the future.
