NoSQL Blog

-- Words from The Founders --

We started the evening by first covering our official mission statement, I then gave a Martin Fowler inspired introduction to NoSQL and set the stage for our three domain-specialists. In order to entice the audience to participate during the Q&A sessions, we did a little experiment. We told everyone that with each question, we would add their name to a hat, and raffle of a rather swanky prize at the end of the evening. "How did that experiment go?" You may ask... Let's just say it's the first time we had to bring the questions to an end in order to get on to the next presentation.

The prize was a wifi-enabled 1TB hard-drive with media-playback functionality and was quite resentful when finally handing it over to the winner!

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Written by Mark Smalley | Published on April 26th, 2013 Tags : kl event malaysia



We are nearing an important epoch in economical evolution that has the potential to be forked forever! The financial institutions that we know and recognize today are standing at the edge of their own demise.

The spin-doctors have been getting rich at our expense, in-turn crafting an intricate concoction of bull-shit fabrication such as quantitative easing, which when fuelled by the never-ending pursuit of the American Dream has led to an accumulation of physical assets that derive their value (to the next schmuck) from the institutions that continue to suck us dry from our hard-earned cold and currently traceable cash... I've had enough and want to do something about it. Fortunately, for once, I'm most certainly not alone…

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Written by Mark Smalley | Published on April 14th, 2013 Tags : big-data bitcoin bdw13



With MongoDB Beijing complete, Mathias Stern (from 10gen) popped-over to Kuala Lumpur for a visit. The moment I heard that 10gen would be visiting, I wanted to try something different. My primary place of work is from a co-working space in Bangsar called Nook, which is why I probably wanted to experiment with a day of co-working. Daniel Yap, the owner of Nook was gracious enough to open his space for the day and allow us to run a day and evening of events.

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Written by Mark Smalley | Published on April 5th, 2013 Tags : kl event mongodb




Neo4j and the concept of graphs is not a topic for the faint of heart, and to be honest, I have absolutely no idea why I find myself (as a web-designer by trade) being drawn to it without reason. It\s truly madness, or is it...?

It's true - I've gone a bit nuts over NoSQL of late, but with good reason, for we have now defined the position of DevOps - something I have zero interest in. With this new generation of data-storage platforms, we have finally empowered designers and developers to take a more active role in a larger stack. Despite this, and whilst ignoring my dislike for setting-up new toys, I finally managed to find a weekend in which I could play with Neo4j. My first and most simplified impression; this thing is epic.

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Written by Mark Smalley | Published on March 4th, 2013 Tags : neo4j graphs



Since stumbling upon the musings of Emin Gün Sirer and his controversial post titled Broken by Design: MongoDB Fault Tolerance, I've found myself with a new respect for trolls. He doesn't give a fuck, and I admire him for that. He is a professor at Cornell University and coincidently happens to have his own shiny new NoSQL solution.

It's called HypderDex and it stores data in a place called HyperSpace!

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Written by Mark Smalley | Published on Feb 24th, 2013 Tags : hyperspace hyperdex



My name is Mark and I want to help organize a NoSQL conference in South East Asia. I've been living in and around Malaysia for the past 15 years and believe that Kuala Lumpur would be an ideal location to host such an event. At the very least, I would like and plan to transform NoSQLasia.org into a place to help consolidate and organize the flow of information, cross-promotion and marketing of the events and communities that are promoting NoSQL throughout South East Asia.

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Written by Mark Smalley | Published on Jan 18th, 2013 Tags : nosqlasia nosql personal