Evaluating key-value and document stores for short read data
bcbio.wordpress.com
bcbio.wordpress.com
Edit: He notes in the comments that a switch to pytc (direct Tokyo Cabinet bindings rather than going through Tyrant) would improve things, but that he wanted to keep it distributed. I'd still like to see where the bottlenecks are, though.
ttserver test.tcb#opts=ld#bnum=1000000#lcnum=10000
d specifies a deflate encoding. The type of database may also make a difference on loading times; in this case it was a B+ tree.
OTOH, he can do that in any rdbms because he does not have large number of simultenous users.