Saturday, 14th February 2009
Tokyo Cabinet: Beyond Key-Value Store. Useful overview of Yet Another Scalable Key Value Store. Interesting points: multiple backends (hash table, B-Tree, in memory, on disk), a “table” engine which enables more advanced queries, a network server that supports HTTP, memcached or its own binary protocol and the ability to extend the engine with Lua scripts.
pytyrant. A pure-python client library for the Tokyo Tyrant binary protocol (used to access Tokyo Cabinet databases over a network). The library appears to be developed by Bob Ippolito and the team at Mochi Media.
Specify your canonical. You can now use a link rel=“canonical” to tell Google that a page has a canonical URL elsewhere. I’ve run in to this problem a bunch of times—in some sites it really does make sense to have the same content shown in two different places—and this seems like a neat solution that could apply to much more than just metadata for external search engines.
Tokyo Tyrant Tutorial. Buried at the bottom of the Tokyo Tyrant protocol documentation, this is the best resource I’ve seen yet for getting up and running with the database server (including setting up replication).
Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant Presentation. By Tokyo Cabinet author Mikio Hirabayashi. The third leg of the Tokyo tripod is Tokyo Dystopia, a full-text search engine which is presumably a modern replacement for Mikio’s older hyperestraier engine.
Xapian performance comparision with Whoosh. Whoosh appears to be around four times slower than Xapian for indexing and empty cache searches, but Xapian with a full cache blows Whoosh out of the water (5408 searches/second compared to 26.3). Considering how fast Xapian is, that’s still a pretty impressive result for the pure-Python Whoosh.
The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac. Will Larson’s impressively comprehensive guide to configuring and securing an Ubuntu VPS from scratch to run Django, using PostgreSQL and Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx.