that warm, fuzzy feeling

Late night browsing, I found this article (via Dare) from last year written by Google's Adam Bosworth: Learning from the web lots of good ideas, but here's the kicker at the end:

It is time that the database vendors stepped up to the plate and started to support a native RSS 2.0/Atom protocol and wire format; a simple way to ask very general queries; a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them; far more fluid schemas that don’t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places; and built-in linear scaling so that the database salespeople can tell their customers, in good conscience, for this class of queries you can scale arbitrarily with regard to throughput and extremely well even with regard to latency, as long as you limit yourself to the following types of queries.

The one database that supports all that and more?

Yep, that's right: The Ning Content Store. Let's see:

• Support Atom protocol and wire format? Check!
• A simple way to ask very general queries? Check! (Just try writing an app, or using any of the apps, and query both your app's data and any other public content in the system)
• a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them? Check! Well, almost actually. But there's lots of simple ways to navigate the Ning Store hierarchy, even for the app hierarchy.
• Far more fluid schemas that don’t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places? Check!
• Built-in linear scaling? Check!

We're not a database vendor, true. But then again, perhaps it was a pipe dream on Adam's part to think that the first one to do this would not be a web company.

Cool eh?