SparkleShare is a collaboration and sharing tool that is designed to keep things simple and to stay out of your way.

Syncany is an open-source cloud storage and filesharing application. It allows users to backup and share certain folders of their workstations using any kind of storage, e.g. FTP, Amazon S3 or Google Storage.

BrowserCouch is an attempt at an in-browser MapReduce implementation. It's written entirely in JavaScript and intended to work on all browsers, gracefully upgrading when support for better efficiency or feature set is detected.

Not coincidentally, this library is intended to mimic the functionality of CouchDB on the client-side, and may even support integration with CouchDB in the future.

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To learn how to use BrowserCouch, check out the work-in-progress tutorial.

If you are familiar with vcs software such as Subversion, you might think of boar as "version control for large binary files". But keep reading, because there is more to it.

Boar stores snapshots of directory trees in a local or remote repository and provides tools to ensure that your data is consistent and complete. You can keep just some or all of your data checked out for viewing and editing.

The repository has a simple layout to ensure that the data can easily be extracted even if the original software should be unavailable. This simplicity makes boar ideal for data that needs safe long-term storage.

Disqus, one of the largest Django applications in the world, will explain how they deal with scaling complexities in a small startup.

There are many benefits to keeping a lightweight stack. At Disqus, keeping the stack thin helps us scale Django to reach over 125 million unique visitors a month with just a small team of engineers. Avoiding complicated software packages until needed reduces unnecessary overhead, and has let us stay nimble, and use new capabilities in Django (i.e., database routing) and other software as they arise. The talk will cover key parts of the architecture and development process at Disqus, including databases (relational and non), queues, automated testing, and continuous deployment.

If you want to try out a new Linux distro, be it the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily ISO or any other (I've only tested it with Ubuntu though!) and don't want to burn a CD each time you want to try a new daily build (and you don't have an USB memory stick around), you can use a cool GRUB 2 feature that lets you boot a live CD ISO directly from your hard disk. You can also use this method to boot varous utilities such as Super Grub Disk, SystemRescueCD, Parted Magic and so on.

Redis is an advanced key-value store. It is similar to memcached but the dataset is not volatile, and values can be strings, exactly like in memcached, but also lists, sets, and ordered sets. All this data types can be manipulated with atomic operations to push/pop elements, add/remove elements, perform server side union, intersection, difference between sets, and so forth. Redis supports different kind of sorting abilities.

In order to be very fast but at the same time persistent the whole dataset is taken in memory, and from time to time saved on disc asynchronously (semi persistent mode) or alternatively every change is written into an append only file (fully persistent mode). Redis is able to rebuild the append only file in background when it gets too big.

You never develop code without version control, why do you develop your database without it?

LiquiBase is an open source (LGPL), database-independent library for tracking, managing and applying database changes. It is built on a simple premise: All database changes are stored in a human readable yet trackable form and checked into source control.

The article discusses how to setup MySQL Replication between two Amazon EC2 instances. It walks you though setting up replication for an empty database server. Adding a slave to a server already full of data is a different article.

It is assumed that you already know the basics of starting EC2 instances, connecting to them via SSH and editing files in Linux using vi/vim etc. For this tutorial, I am using the Amazon built machine image ami-2b5fba42 which is Fedora 8 base image.

Since the rise of the Web, SQL-based relational databases have been the dominant structured storage technology behind online applications. The past few years have seen the emergence of the cloud as a compelling environment for online application development, bringing true utility computing into the infrastructure pantheon. But the cloud and SQL do not mix well, and multiple efforts are now underway to offer viable alternatives to the venerable database. In this article, I'll review the forces that have led to this shift, and I'll argue that while relational databases are by no means doomed, they will soon be joined in the cloud, and possibly out-shined by, new non-relational database technologies.