ActiveRecord is pretty awesome. Â And column-oriented data storage? Â Also awesome. Â Relational databases for ambitiously scalable websites serving massive amounts of data? Â Not so much.
So we were riding the Rails and we wanted to go big. Â But replication and sharding with MySQL made us want to go home. Â Then we got seduced by a Google-inspired bleeding-edge project called HBase, a siren who called out ‘distributed!’, ’schema-less!’ and ‘map/reduce!’. Â The result? Â 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.