Simon Willison’s Weblog

NoSQL: Whats the simplest on disk key-value storage?

4th October 2012

My answer to NoSQL: Whats the simplest on disk key-value storage? on Quora

Surprisingly there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to this. Here are a few options:

• MemcacheDB provides a Berkeley DB storage layer with a memcache protocol compatible interface. http://memcachedb.org/—it hasn’t been updated since 2008 though.
• Tokyo Cabinet used to be a contender here, but by its own admission has now been superseded by Kyoto Cabinet. I don’t know how widely used or mature Kyoto Cabinet is: http://fallabs.com/kyotocabinet/
• Google’s leveldb library is an extremely fast, stable key-value storage library (it’s used by Riak)... but on its own it doesn’t come with a server. http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/—there is a leverdb-server project on github that adds the server layer but it doesn’t look like it’s particularly mature or actively maintained: https://github.com/srinikom/leve...
• It might be worth looking at Riak—it may be over-kill for what you need, but it’s definitely actively maintained and has an excellent reputation: http://wiki.basho.com/