I saw a great talk today here at OSCON Data up in Portland, Oregon. The talk was Practical Data Storage: MongoDB @ foursquare and was given by foursquare‘s head of server engineering, Harry Heymann. The talk was particularly impressive since, due to AV issues, Harry had to wing it and go slideless. (He did post his slides to twitter so folks with access could follow along).
After the talk I grabbed a few minutes with Harry and did the following interview:
Some of the ground Harry covers
- What is foursquare and how it feeds your data back to you
- “Software is eating the world”
- How foursquare got to MongoDB from MySQL
- Handling 3400% growth
- How they use Hadoop for offline data
- Running on Amazon EC2 and at what point does it make sense to move to their own servers
Extra-credit reading
- Harry’s Slides: Practical Data Storage: MongoDB @foursquare
Pau for now…