Comment by pcarmichael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcarmichael | Hacker News Reader

The timing for me is interesting as I was just about to start up a cassandra setup here. This might be a better fit for my particular needs if I could get it running. Unfortunately, I'm having a difficult time figuring out where to start. A general getting started guide would be very helpful.

- The FAQ on membase.org is empty and the wiki does not appear to be populated with much content (i.e. 'Directions for working with the membase source and descriptions of the components in the source will be available soon').

- The google group does not appear to have significant content besides a 'Where's the ruby driver?' post.

- My work blocks IRC, so jumping on freenode isn't an option.

- I tried downloading from the northscale.com site, but for whatever reason I cannot enter the required fields on the download form (in Firefox 3.6.4).

- I downloaded the source, which is broken out into a number of directories - figuring out what the various subsystems are and what needs to be done is going to take some digging.

Thanks for reporting the FF issue. The site's been updated and tested again.

We've obviously got a bit to go from our internal build farms to things that are easier for other contributors to play with. Documentation for developers is still being written.

Forgetting everything we know about the things we've been doing for a while so we can explain it to people who haven't been doing it has proven to be a bit harder than we initially thought. :)

I offer no counter or dissent to your post. However, apparently, the binaries have not yet been posted. Perhaps once they get that crucial detail finished, things will be clear. It appears they haven't even reached an actual beta stage. It might have been better for them to wait until everything was ready to go before launching the site publicly.

Considering the 'front-end' of membase is memcached code, you should be able to use any library that interfaces with memcached to interface with membase.

Out of curiosity, what drew you towards Cassandra over, say, Riak or MongoDB?

MongoDB was ruled out because auto-sharding is still alpha (though it should be out of alpha soon, I'd prefer to wait and see what the community experience is with it first.)

Between Cassandra and Riak, I chose Cassandra because it can run on windows while Riak cannot. I needed it for a data store for some cluster computing work I'm doing, but for various reasons needed my test environment to be windows only. I think I can get rid of that restriction; perhaps benchmarking Riak vs. Cassandra for my particular use case is in order.

Linux 64-bit binary is available without filling out any forms at http://labs.northscale.com/membase/

My work blocks IRC, so jumping on freenode isn't an option

Get yourself a shell account and run irssi under screen.

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