tecznotes

OceanStore is neat:

OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers. Any computer can join the infrastructure, contributing storage or providing local user access in exchange for economic compensation.

Well, except the economic compensation bit. If well-handled, this idea could take off like its close cousins DNS and Bittorrent. If poorly handled, someone else will do it because it feels like an idea whose time is close at hand. Google's already deployed something like it with Google Base, but they're blindly focused on its utility for "content owners" (They sound like the MPAA jackass on NPR this morning braying about "entertainment product").

OceanStore is touching on the same attitude towards storage I'm seeing in projects such as Atop Axiom, namely a slight distancing from SQL towards purer object stores. This move loses the big advantage of SQL's indexes and searches in favor of distributability and fuzzy degrees of confidence. Your credit card company isn't about to switch (SQL solved their problems neatly almost 30 years ago), but projects like ForwardTrack could play.