FOSDEM is an absolutely open and free conference in Brussels, Belgium. The conference offers an impressive amount of developer rooms discussing a broad range of technical topics, including NoSQL and graphs.

After a funny and productive ArangoDB hackathon weekend Frank and I arrived at FOSDEM on Sunday noon. We were looking forward to the talks in the graph devroom, but unfortunately for us it was not possible to enter the room (it was overfull, indicating a great quality of talks).At the next speakers change Frank and I managed to slip into the room and could enjoy two inspiring talks by..

The ArangoDB team traveled to Barcelona for the “NoSQL matters” – weekend. Day one was packed with a lot of NoSQL-trainings and Jan introduced the NoSQL landscape by explaining how to model your data in a non-relational world. Following the wish of many participants Jan had to repeat the morning session about the new and exciting possibilities of NoSQL in the afternoon.

Last week Jan (core member of ArangoDB and the brain behind AQL and many other parts) was invited by “mobile.cologne” – a user group here in Cologne dealing with mobile development.

In this talk Jan gives a general overview on nosql databases and the different flavors. He explains how to query a nosql database and he evaluates how a nosql database can be used in a mobile app.

To easily conduct bulk insert benchmarks with different NoSQL databases, we wrapped a small benchmark tool in PHP. The tool can be used to measure the time it takes to bulk upload data into MongoDB, CouchDB, and ArangoDB using the databases’ bulk documents APIs.The tool can also measure datafile sizes after the bulk load. The tool will upload documents to the databases in chunks, without concurrency (remember, this is PHP). It will report the total time needed, plus the amount of time needed for the database operations only (some of the total time might be spent in data generation etc., this..

In the relational world, PL/SQL is used to store business/application logic inside the relational database. The same movement is currently happening in the NoSQL. Redis for example uses LUA script in its newest version (2.6), to allow developers to tweak Redis. There a lot of use-cases for a programming language in document-stores. Programming languages are used in various document stores like ArangoDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, or VoltDB. In my opinion in the following use-cases a suitable language like Ruby will be most handy.

The REST API for AvocadoDB is already available and stable and people are writing APIs using it. Awesome. As AvocacoDB offers more complex data structures like graphs and lists REST is not enough. We implemented a first version of a query language some time ago which is very similar to SQL and UNQL.

UNQL started with quite some hype last year. However, after some burst of activity the project came to a hold. So it seems, that – at least as a project – UNQL has been a failure. IMHO one of the major issues with the current UNQL is, that it tries to cover everything in NoSQL, from key-value stores to document-stores to graph-database. Basically you end up with greatest common divisor – namely key-value access. But with graph structures and also document-structures you really want to supports joins,..

Note: We changed the name of the database in May 2012. AvocadoDB is now called ArangoDB.

Are you a Python expert and want to contribute to an open source project? We need your help writing an API for Python for a new nosql database!

AvocadoDB is a rather new open source project – a fancy nosql database with a couple of interesting features:

• Schema-free schemata
• Usable asapplication server
• Consequent use of JavaScript
• multi-threaded
• Flexible data modeling (key value pairs, document store, graph database)
• Free index choice
• Configurable durability
• Support for modern storage hardware like SSD..

Before we started programming the new open source NoSQL database, we reflected which design objectives to achieve or to drop. This article summarizes our considerations.

In a nutshell:

• Schema-free schemas with shapes: Inherent structures at hand are automatically recognized and subsequently optimized.
• Querying: ArangoDB is able to accomplish complex operations on the provided data (query-by-example and query-language).
• Application Server: ArangoDB is able to act as application server on Javascript-devised routines.
• Mostly memory/durability: ArangoDB is memory-based including frequent file..