“Many modern web sites need fast access to an amount of information so large that it cannot be efficiently stored on a single computer,” Nick Kallen wrote on Twitter’s blog . A good way to deal with this problem is to “shard” that information; that is, store it across multiple computers instead of on just one.” As an alternative to sharding, Twitter has developed a framework that can be used in lieu of either custom-building data-store systems or using untested open-source alternatives and is sharing the code with the public. Sponsor From a number of data-store building experiences, Twitter has “extracted Gizzard, a Scala framework that makes it easy to create custom fault-tolerant, distributed databases.” As an example, Kallen provides ” Rowz .” “To get up-and-running with Gizzard quickly, clone Rows and start customizing!” The full code for Gizzard is also available. He describes Gizzard as a middleware networking service that handles partitioning through a forwarding table, supports migration and prosecutes “eventual consistency.” The implication of this may be that startups and smaller companies may better be able to deal with large amounts of data quickly, and thereby better serve the needs their users with fewer resources expended. Discuss

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Trumba , the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach “custom objects” to their Web calendars and other websites. These “objects” are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages. Trumba’s customers use the company’s software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints. Sponsor The custom objects advance the inherent modularity of Trumba’s offerings. From Trumba : “To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website.” Dan Hickman, Trumba’s president, wrote us: “Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that’s not even related to your calendar.” Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content. Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago. Discuss

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Some companies have spent most of their time trying to convince you that heavy duty just means a little tougher than you’d normally find. Well at OnePoint Solutions, we know how to build heavy duty workbenches. We have designed them to be a truly heavy duty work station, not just some workbench wearing a fancy [...]

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