another column-oriented database: Apache Cassandra

I came across an article at H-Open on Apache Cassandra. The Cassandra project was actually started by Facebook, but then open sourced and "donated" to Apache, and Facebook got a Gold Sponsor of Apache. The article also includes a hint on Google's BigTable. "Cassandra is used by a number of other companies, such as Cisco, Twitter, Digg and Rackspace."

column-oriented databases

I read this article on InfiniDB, and I thought, it would help at least myself, if I took a note on it here.

The centrepiece of InfiniDB is a column-oriented back end ("engine") . MySQL database 5.1.39 serves as the basis of InfiniDB and comes linked to the back end. Since there is no indication of other storage engines either in the source code or in the InfiniDB documentation, this seems to be a pruned version.

Of course, using a pruned version makes it impossible to combine queries into different engines, I am not going to describe the disadvantages here.

Other column-oriented free databases (Infobright, LucidDB, and MonetDB) and also a commercial one (Kickfire) get mentioned in that article.

This topic always reminds me of my time in an environment, where FAMEdb got used.