NorthScale Blog

Recently, Attila Kiskó, the author of the best .NET memcached client, the Enyim .NET memcached client, has been enhancing his client library to speak directly to membase data nodes.  Membase already supports all existing memcached client libraries and memcached protocols via a high-performance proxy, but there’s a “direct path” that client libraries can use for ever-increased performance.  Along the way, we ended up with a quick guide on the membase.org wiki on how to create your own native or “smart” membase client library, so anybody else with their own favorite programming language can also do the same.

http://wiki.membase.org/bin/view/Main/ClientImplementationGuide

The easiest approach is to start with your favorite memcached client library (that speaks memcached binary protocol) and proceed from there.  The fun part  is with handling the cases during Rebalance operations to allow for seamless cluster elasticity without data loss, but who doesn’t like fun challenges like these?

Lots of great enhancements have gone into membase and memcached recently, and I’m especially excited with the new vbucket capability — see: http://dustin.github.com/2010/06/29/memcached-vbuckets.html.  Say hello to the ability to explicitly migrate and replicate keys/values between servers, without downtime, while still keeping to memcached’s uber performance.

And, moxi (the memcached/membase proxy) is keeping pace with the new vbucket improvements.  You can find the latest moxi open-source development work happening on the ‘vbucket’ branch here: http://github.com/northscale/moxi/tree/vbucket. Read more »

Just a quick note, I'll be at Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend, giving a talk on Using memcached to Scale Out Your Website.