Membase a new NoSQL

"For those familiar with memcached, membase provides on-the-wire protocol compatibility, but adds disk persistence; hierarchical storage management; data replication; live cluster reconfiguration and rebalancing; and secure multi-tenancy with data partitioning. Like memcached, membase is simple, fast and elastic."

I bet a lot of large sites using multiple memcached servers would find this interesting.

Why would a static, informational web site be using a database?

There is an argument in favor of marketing to the perception, though. I am sure he/she is not the only viewer that might assume they are eating their own dog food and using it behind their website. We have countless tales on HN about increasing customer interest by speeding up your site. If you want to talk about how cool your tech is, make sure your website reflects a similar attention to the important details. I think the comment is legitimate for the perspective even if the technological reality is that the slowness is completely unrelated to the database.

Also, given the popularity of CRMs and so forth, it might not be good to assume that the pages are really "static". For all we know, their site is using their database to provide content -- edited by documentation/marketing folks -- to page templates.

Sounds a lot like what Redis is doing with Redis Cluster, except this one is already in production.

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.