One of our training courses has a section covering MySQL's Memcached API, and how it works. In the discussion, there's a line that goes like this:

 "A key is similar to a primary key in a table, and a value is similar to a second column in the same table"

For someone well versed in database tables but not so much in key-value stores, that sentence might take a bit of grasping. So, let's break it down.

An Example Key/Value Store 

Imagine the table kvstore has a column key and a column value. Also imagine that we've set up the Memcached plugin in MySQL and configured it to use that table and those columns as its store. I won't get into that bit for now, but trust me, it's not that hard.

You might be familiar with statements like this:

REPLACE INTO kvstore (key, value) VALUES ('X', 'Y');
SELECT value FROM kvstore WHERE key='X';

Now imagine you want to be …

Persistence Smoothie: Blending NoSQL and SQL – see user feedback and comments at http://joind.in/talk/view/1332.

Michael Bleigh from Intridea, high-end Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultants, build apps from start to finish, making it scalable. He’s written a lot of stuff, available at http://github.com/intridea. @mbleigh on twitter

NoSQL is a new way to think about persistence. Most NoSQL systems are not ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Generally, most NoSQL systems have:

• Denormalization
  
• Eventual Consistency
  
• Schema-Free
  
• Horizontal Scale
  

NoSQL tries to scale (more) simply, it is starting to go mainstream – NY …

Key-value databases are catching fire these days. Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Keyspace, Tokyo Tyrant, and a handful of others are surging in popularity, judging by the contents of my feed reader.

I find a number of things interesting about these tools.

• There are many more of them than open-source traditional relational databases. (edit: I mean that there are many options that all seem similar to each other, instead of 3 or 4 standing out as the giants.)
• It seems that a lot of people are simultaneously inventing solutions to their problems in private without being aware of each other, then open-sourcing the results. That points to a sudden sea change in architectures. Tipping points tend to be abrupt, which would explain isolated redundant development.
• Many of the products are feature-rich with things programmers need: diverse language bindings, APIs, embeddability, and the ability to speak familiar …