ActiveRecord is pretty awesome. And column-oriented data storage? Also awesome. Relational databases for ambitiously scalable websites serving massive amounts of data? Not so much.
So we were riding the Rails and we wanted to go big. But replication and sharding with MySQL made us want to go home. Then we got seduced by a Google-inspired bleeding-edge project called HBase, a siren who called out ‘distributed!’, ’schema-less!’ and ‘map/reduce!’. The result? A rewrite of ActiveRecord for a new kind of non-relational database.
BigRecord is ActiveRecord for web-scale column-oriented systems like HBase (e.g. Cassandra, Hypertable) and with some help, can be adapted for document-oriented databases, too (e.g. CouchDB, Dynomite, ThruDB, Tokyo Cabinet).
We’re putting it out there.