Denormalizing a variety of data-types to a standard type for display

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

What is Riak good for? I get that we developers often denormalize a database to gain speed. I am not sure I totally get this, but I think this talk from developers at Yammer is about denormalizing data to a standard format, so that you can also get a simplicity and speed when you display it. In this graph they have “notifications” on the left, and then they start dividing it by status and by specific properties, which is strange, since its not a standard format, if it has specific properties? Or maybe the properties are standard, though their values change? I also think they suggested that they were not storing all the data they show, but only a bunch of IDs that point back to their “real” database. That is, if they use PostGreSql as their real database, they store a “rollup” of ids in Riak, so from Riak they get an item which gives them all the items to look up in PostGreSql, thus saving a lot of time otherwise spent on processing? Of course, I could be misunderstanding them.

A bucket just for cursors, keyed by user_id and cursor name, so each user can have a different cursor for every kind of notification:

Post external references

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    http://basho.com/riak-and-scala-at-yammer/
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