Due to the enthusiastic response to the topic suggestion at last weeks Rails 3 discussion. We are going to spend some time discussing NoSQL and/or Post Relational data storage solutions.

NoSQL and Post Relational are of course the new book sale fueling buzzword umbrella terms for a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases and ACID guarantees. (thanks wikipedia). The Gilt group is hosting what I hope to be a lively exploration of the different use-cases and motivations for using and integrating

Document Stores [CouchDB, MongoDB, CLoudKit, etc];
Key/Value Cache & Stores [Velocity, Kerracoqa, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, Project Voldemort, etc];
Distributed File/Tabular/Mesh Stores [Hadoop, Cassandra, Mnesia, Hbase, etc],
Ordered Key/Value Stores [tokyo tyrant, lightcloud, NMDB, luxio, memcachedb, actord]
and perhaps the unsung actor driving the simplest solutions the Flat Static File Store.

Lots of ground to cover in a couple of hours, so to make sure we can navigate the landscape and still maintain a free and open discussion atmosphere I'm looking for a few people to step up and take on representing their favorite Post Relational Data Store (PRDS) to a inquisitive audience who will no doubt want to see the hows, whys and pragmatic use cases of these shiny tools.

Our Hosts The Gilt Group has a good ratio of ruby developers in New York and as Jim Lindstrom found out by leveraging the Betweenness Centrality algorithm against Github . Gilt employs some of Github's most central coders in a New York.

Gilt has been exercising Project Voldemort and have offered to show off their persistence layer based on it.