I attended the first NoSQL meetup in SF last Thursday and took some notes. This meeting was a presentation and discussion of distributed, non-relational database systems (DNRDBMS). Examples include Google's Bigtable, Amazon's Dynamo, and Yahoo!'s UDB and Sherpa. A couple of the systems presented were built on Hadoop's HDFS.

This was an exciting meeting -- the vibe was great, everyone was supportive and interested. Lots of emphasis on architecture, features and technology, lots of smart people. I learned a ton. This writeup is basically a narrative of my impressions during the presentations. A more structured comparison of the projects would be interesting too. The focus was mainly, but not totally on open source implementations. I was very impressed by all of the people and projects presented.

Please note that this written from my point of view as the product manager for Sherpa, Yahoo!'s internal cloud key-value store. Despite any real or perceived snark, I was very impressed by all of the people and projects presented, and by the excitement