BigTable is Google’s proprietary, non-relational database that powers Google Search and tons of its other products. It’s based on GoogleFS — their own filesystem — that allows them to get scary access speeds from multiple systems in a cluster.

It’ll be interesting to see what developers can do with this as a service.

[ Google Opening BigTable as a Web Service ]

This article discusses a very cool idea: having databases contain everything except the information that it contains. The upshot is that you can’t really harvest from this type of database in the same way you can with a standard, “positive” database. A very interesting idea.

This site will let you select the book you have from Amazon and a number of other sources, and then maintain a list of what you own. Very cool stuff — especially for geeks like me that have over a hundred technical books and need to know exactly what we currently own to avoid buying duplicates. :)

http://www.librarything.com/

A while back I wrote myself a little online books database using L.A.M.P; it was utterly simple — a couple of text fields for the author and book title, and a way to list the current books in the library.

Well, just recently, someone commented on the post that I should use librarything.com. I just went and checked it out and it’s quite awesome.

If you’re into reading and/or are anal enough to want to know exactly what books you own, you need to check it out:

http://www.librarything.com

I’m horny for books. I read them, I collect them, I admire them — especially those that are information security related.

Recently I’ve been running into a problem in the bookstore while browsing. I come across a title that looks intruiging and then realize that I’m not sure whether or not I already own it. It’s a horrible feeling, really. The old me says buy it anyway and give it away if it’s a duplicate, but the new me demands that I check first to see if I own it.

The obvious solution is to be able to check, from the bookstore, whether or not I actually already have a given book. So I made a list of my books in vi, sorted it for easy searching, and put it on the site.

Now, whenever I’m in doubt, I can conjure the page over my Blackberry and check to see if I have the damn thing before I buy it. :) W00t.

http://dmiessler.com/mybooks

Next I’ll complete my previous project of manually building a database to do this using LAMP. I did it already, but my table structure was primitive and the only functions I had were viewing all books and adding new books. What I’d ultimately like to be able to do is search by any field, e.g. author, edition, subject, etc.

Another thought I’ve been throwing around is the concept of tagging along the lines of Delicious. In other words, take each book and give it a series of tags. Then, just as with Delicious and Flikr, I could search for all books with a given tag (or even multiple tags). As an example, it’d be cool to call up all books of mine that have to do with database, or all my Python books, etc. Anyway, this’ll work for now.

Slashdot is running a story about MySQL buddying up with SCO, and both the story itself and the /. comments are quite enlightening. I’ve always liked MySQL myself — or, to put it another way, I’ve never had a problem with it when using it for the few things I’ve used it for. But hearing about these potentially seed affiliations and less than desirable licensing options is not very comforting.

In addition, one fellow geek (Stankdog from binrev) — someone far more versed in database than I am — thinks Postgres is definitely is a dramatically superior database overall. Another buddy of mine points out that the main reason MySQL got so big is because of blogging. Every major blogging package I know of is based on it. As a result, Postgres is little more to most people than, “that other open-source database”.

The upshot is that it may be time for us geeks to start thinking about Postgres as a lot more than the “other” option. An anonymous coward on /. summed it up well:

“Even those who trust MySQL and Trolltech must realize that their GPL + proprietary licensing schemes lead to future lock-in, and should be avoided for that reason alone. If you are a MySQL user, and you care about the future of Open Source, you should be looking at alternatives, such as PostgreSQL.”