MongoDB the Definitive Guide by Kristina Chodrow and Michael Dirolf

The kind folks at O'Reilly sent me a fantastic book about MongoDB. This was a great read since it’s suited for people who do Operations and Development and Performance tuning (me). I've been using Cassandra for quite some time now (months lol) and the thing that has irritated me about Cassandra is the documentation for it. Cassandra documentation sucks, its hard to speed up on the internals. This MongoDB book is written by the most active participants that are developing MongoDB and the knowledge shows. What I like is it starts out on how to quickly get it up, add/get/update data to the DB. Then progresses to more advance topics-that talk about GridFS and MongoDB drivers. Personally I would like to see more elaboration of this facet in terms of motivation of why do this, what the win is and how it fits into the "Fast by Default" mantra. Each step is organized perfectly, and detailed with nice graphics that illustrate the document store or the flow of data from a systems view. When looking at the documentation on mongodb.org I see the same sort of clarity in this book. Comparing other NoSQL information, I do not see this transparency, which is rather frustrating because the learning curve is much larger. I'm so impressed with the info, and test results around the web that I'm moving to add this to my environment. Does this mean I'll get rid of my current Cassandra deployment? Probably not since its working great for my needs now.


Overall, great book, great info, intelligently presented with a straightforward explanation of how MongoDB works.

Review of High Availability MySQL Cookbook by Packt Publishing

A few months ago, I reviewed MySQL Admin Cookbook. Today I am reviewing High Availability MySQL Cookbook from Packt Publishing by Alex Davies. Overall, I found the book to contain some good hidden Gems.

The book is a mixture of MySQL Cluster (NDB), Replication schemes, some performance tuning, some minor kernel tweaking, and some more exotic approaches to common High Availability problems. Overall, I found this book very informative and a good read.
Now the specifics, the book starts out on NDB and stays focused on this fact for about 60% of the book. The next 20% is on mySQL replication then about 10% of the book is on tweaking kernel, mysql, network settings to get the most out of the system. The last 10% is a mixture of uses of exotic systems such as GFS, Conga, ISCSI and how to use these shared storage techs with mySQL.

High Availability MySQL Cookbook, is a good read, and jogged my memory on NDB (since I do not use it on a day-to-day basis). If you are looking for a good reference on how to get an HA system up then this is a good book for you. If you are looking for why to use NDB over mySQL multi-master replication, this is not a book for you. The “why-to-use-this-over-that” is not the scope of the book. The drawbacks and concerns of what technology to use are not a focus of this book, and should not be. It is assumed that the reader knows which direction to go into for the most part or gives the reader enough information to set up and environment to see which way to go.

In conclusion, I like this book. I think it is rather concise, and right to the point, which either gets you started into building HA systems or gives you a good reference for an existing HA environment.