Column oriented databases

If you find yourself in the market for something to handle your analytics - or any other application that generates tens of millions of rows in your database - do yourself a favour and look at InfiniDB. It's a database engine for MySQL, and it works exceptionally well.

We tried a number of the popular "NoSQL" options, but they're all incredibly difficult to set up, and they all require a separate API to use, and it's generally a Java API. I have nothing against Java, but given the choice I'd rather use the PHP MySQL API since we already have a tons of code using that. The final nail in the coffin for these systems was that our management wanted to be able to do realtime ad-hoc queries, and we haven't seen a NoSQL option yet that offers such a thing. They'll grind through ten billion rows, but they aren't going to do it with you sitting there watching - they'll get back to you in a little while.

Yes, it's a commercial product. That being said, until you need to run a distributed (i.e. multi-machine) setup, you can use the "community edition" for nothing, regardless of what you're using it for.

The Soul of a New Machine

I just re-read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Just stellar. If you're interested at all in the history of computing, you really must read this book. It follows a team of engineers designing and building an early 32-bit minicomputer in the late 70's. Kidder was brought in quite early in the development to document the process and he did an exemplary job of it.

If you're too cheap to buy it and your local library doesn't have it, you can borrow my copy. Yeah, that's right. It's now part of my library, it's that good. (I read 20 or 30 novels a year, and they normally go out the door as quickly as they came in.)