Fluidinfo is often described as “Wikipedia for data”. More precisely, it is a single-instance online storage solution that makes it possible for people, businesses, and their applications to create, search on, organize, and share metadata about anything. Fluidinfo provides instant online APIs to those who use it for storage.

The Ruby DBI module provides a database-independent interface for Ruby scripts similar to that of the Perl DBI module. This document describes how to write Ruby DBI-based scripts. It is an adjunct to and not a substitute for the Ruby DBI specification documents. See the "Resources" section for a pointer to the specifications and also for information about downloading the example scripts used here.

I recently had to move our production database at Listia.com from a custom MySQL installation over to Amazon RDS.  The big benefits of RDS for us were automated backups, automatic failover to another availability zone, quick instance size scaling with no downtime (edit: up to 3 minutes of downtime, can be more if there are issues) , and super easy slave deployment.  We had been managing all of it ourselves over the past year with just 2-3 people (btw, we are well-funded and hiring now!) and it was taking up a lot of our time to maintain everything while scaling from 0 to over 20 million pageviews a month.

Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems facing large data caches. Its API is available for most popular languages.

MADlib is an open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data.

The MADlib mission: to foster widespread development of scalable analytic skills, by harnessing efforts from commercial practice, academic research, and open-source development.

Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

redis: the AK-47 of databases

Recently, Tim Anglade culminated his NOSQL World Tour with the release of the NOSQL Tapes, a collection of live interviews collected globally. Not only do I find that site aesthetically pleasing (courtesy of our own Steadicat), but there is a tremendous amount of solid content, from technical discussions to opinions and conjectures from many of the young leaders in the field. I was fortunate to get a bit of Tim’s time when he stopped in Seattle and we recorded a longish video on MapReduce in my lab at UW. While I love the old school feel of a chalk-talk, I must admit I’m pretty embarrassed at how rambling and fragmented my explanations are, not to mention my shoddy use of available board space. Therefore the Physics Professor in me feels obligated to try again, albeit offline this time.

MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide rich queries and deep functionality).

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database. Written in C++, MongoDB features:

A CouchDB server hosts named databases, which store documents. Each document is uniquely named in the database, and CouchDB provides a RESTful HTTP API for reading and updating (add, edit, delete) database documents.

CouchDBX is the simplest way to get CouchDB running on your Mac

Tired of querying in antiquated SQL?
Well, you don't have to!  LINQPad lets you interactively query databases in a modern query language: LINQ.  Kiss goodbye to SQL Management Studio!

An Open Source Microkernel DBMS for High Performance Scale-Out Applications