I just love the incredible speed with which new technology paradigms appear and gain traction in these happy and hale days of bubbledom. Less than a month after I discovered document-oriented databases, there’s a new one in the mix: ThruDB. Don’t look at the Ruby sample code, it’ll hurt your eyes - the creators of ThruDB aren’t Rubyists. Instead, I recommend Sebastian Delmont's writeup of how it could be used with Rails. Rather than write an ActiveRecord adapter, he suggests an ActiveDocument which uses a DataMapper type pattern for the schema, and has similar methods and callback hooks for most operations. Finds would use ThruDB’s native query language, which is the Lucene syntax.
Sebastian puts it quite nicely: ”I’m willing to trade off some performance for the promise of infinite scalability.” Yeah, me too.