Lone Star Ruby Conf Speaker Interview: Jesse Wolgamott

Today's a twofer for the Lone Star Ruby Conference.  My third interview (second today) is with Jesse Wolgamott (@jwo) who's presenting "Battle of NoSQL stars: Amazon's SDB vs Mongoid vs CouchDB vs RavenDB ".  Jesse shares some thoughts about NoSQL and the conference.

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NoSQL looks like it's gaining momentum.  Why should Rubyists be interested in the topic?

Jesse Once you reach the point in transaction system where the database is the scalability cause of your scalability problems, there's no going back. You've taken the red pill. Table-based transaction databases are constrained by memory and there's a hard maximum until your app crawls to a halt. The dream of true replication and easy sharding is built in.

Also: migrations just suck, even in Rails.

There are a lot of NoSQL players, what made you zero in on these four?

Jesse CouchDB was my first experience with NoSQL -- the built-in map-reduce is so unique. MongoDB is a newer kid on the block, and is easier to get running in Rails, so that's a plus. I like to mention Amazon's SDB because it's frequently overlooked; You use Amazon's servers so in that respect it's the easiest to setup. RavenDB is new and shiny. Cassandra is also really cool, but not as ruby/rails friendly.

What's your current involvement in the NoSQL world?

Jesse I've used CouchDB, MongoDB, and SDB in the real world, but I'm just a lowly programmer.

What made you want to present at LSRC this year?

Jesse I got jealous looking at all the ruby conferences across the country, and heard about LSRC through the local Houston ruby group. Austin rules, Ruby rules, so win win win.

Other than your own talk, what are you most looking forward to at LSRC 2010?

Jesse The "Vim for the modern Rubyist" talk -- Vim is so hot right now! (but really, it should be cool and I love the AntiIDE thinking).