Introducing TillStore

Update, 2009-10-24: Fixed a bug, and committed a couple other improvements — TillStore 0.2.0 is released!

I went to nosqlberlin last week and I got inspired. I listened to a lot of interesting talks — most notably about Redis, CouchDB, Riak and MongoDB (I'm omitting two talks, which of course were not less awesome than the rest!) Due to an unfortunate circumstance I had six hours to hack on stuff from Thursday to Friday.

And here it is — I'm proud to present my very own approach to key-value stores: TillStore!

What is a key-value store?

In a nutshell, a key-value store is a database for values (Doh!). There are no duplicates, it's always a key mapped to a value. No bells and whistles — most just want to be fast. Eventually consistent is another attribute which most of them like to claim for themselves. The value term (in key-value store) is very flexible. Some key-value stores only support certain types, TillStore supports them all through JSON. ;-)

Other examples for key-value stores include Riak, Redis, Cassandra and Tokyo Cabinet.

TillStore?

So vain, right? Well, in the beginning TillStore was an inside joke with a colleague. And to be honest, TillStore was nothing more but the following:

<?php
$tillStore = array();
?>

However, when I had time to hack away on Thursday night, I took it a slightly higher level. ;-)

What is TillStore?

TillStore is a key-value store written in PHP.

TillStore is RAM-based, and fast. By default TillStore uses /dev/shm on Linux. If you don't happen to be on Linux, just create a RAM disk and feed it into TillStore.

TillStore is two components — TillStore and TillStore_Server.

The TillStore_Server component provides a simple HTTP-API to TillStore.

The TillStore component is unit-tested! :-)

And last but not least: TillStore is a proof of concept.

What TillStore is not.

TillStore is not production-ready, though my initial benchmark suggests that it might work for a lot of websites out there. The test was run on a Lenovo X61s notebook, duo core something, 4 GB RAM and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (BETA).

TillStore is not persistent — at least not out of the box. TillStore can be configured to use persistent storage (e.g. a harddrive), but I guess that's when it'll start loosing speed. If you happen to care about the data you store in TillStore, please run a cronjob.

TillStore is not bug free. Especially my HTTP-API needs work. ;-) It tends to choke on complex JSON structures. So JSON is not yet support using the HTTP-API. I also need to clean-up my socket binding and the configuration part.

TillStore's configuration is not very flexible. I realize that part needs some work.

How do you get TillStore?

The code is currently on 0.1.0 (alpha) and hosted on Github.

It's do-what-you-want-licensed (The new BSD License!).

Installation — that's the easy part: it's all in INSTALL.md. There are a few more additions in git already (99.999999999% cosmetics) and I plan to iron out some bugs before I do 0.2.0.

Running TillStore

Running TillStore is easy as well. If you followed one of the PEAR-ways to install, just execute /usr/bin/TillStore and it will start up and bind itself to localhost and port 31337.

Then curl some URLs, e.g.

curl http://localhost:31337/foo

... attempts to fetch the key foo, while,

curl -X POST -d bar http://localhost:31337/foo

... saves the value bar into the key foo. (Get it? key-value ~~save~~ store!) :-)

Conclusion

I'd like feedback on the idea. :-) Of course I encourage everyone to fork it and break it.

Till's blog