Comments on: The State of SimpleDB Clones

By: robtweed

robtweed — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:15:37 +0000

Yes it's a difficult balancing act creating something like M/DB: how much do you provide ready-fixed and how much do you leave configurable so users can adapt it to their needs. As an Open Source product, my view was to provide a simple basic “out of the box” configuration that others could adapt as needed, and build it in such a way that such adaptation was possible.

With M/DB soon to be a pre-built image provided by Canonical in their Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Image Store, I'm hoping that more of the SDB client authors will be motivated to provide M/DB configurability as a matter of course. I think that's the real solution you need!

Rob

By: robtweed

robtweed — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:10:55 +0000

I'd suggest getting a standard off the shelf Debian or Ubuntu pre-built VirtualBox VM and then just apply the M/DB installer to it. I know VMWare have standard pre-built Linux VMs in their marketplace – not sure if these can be adapted for VirtualBox or whether an equivalent exists elsewhere.

As you noted we used to provide M/DB as a pre-built VMWare VM but to be honest it was more trouble than it was worth once we had the installer instead. The installer gives you a lot more flexibility and it's a lot easier for us to manage and maintain.

Rob

By: avdi

avdi — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:04:51 +0000

P.S. Are there any plans to distibute a VirtualBox appliance?

By: avdi

avdi — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:03:22 +0000

Thanks very much for the reply. You're right that with enough fiddling (and maybe a RightAWS patch) I probably could have gotten it working – it was just one of those cases where the investment didn't justify the payoff. I might try again before attempting to add the next round of features to the gem.

By: robtweed

robtweed — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:44:26 +0000

A few comments about M/DB if I may:

- we're working on an rpm installer. Since M/DB is an application written on top of the GT.M database, it will run on any platform supported by GT.M, which for the open source version, means GNU Linux. I'm afraid there won't be a Mac version as a result. You could of course run it as a Linux VM inside OSX using eg Parallels or similar.

- however M/DB is compatible with the Cache' database which is available natively on OSX, but Cache' is a commercially licensed database product

- Yes the default configuration for Apache is set up as port 80 but you can change this to whatever you like in the Apache config file. Similarly it ought to be a simple task to add some mod_rewrite rules to map the M/DB path (/mdb/request.mgwsi) to a simple path that DataMapper can handle.

- Alternatively get in touch with the folks who wrote the RightAWS library. Getting a change made to the endpoint URL should be pretty trivial for them. By comparison the standard off-the-shelf Python SimpleDB interface (boto) was already configurable for M/DB by using some appropriate parameters in the connect_sdb() function.

Hope this helps

Rob Tweed
M/Gateway Developments Ltd