The Digg developers have announced that they are abandoning MySQL, the database that has been powering the social link sharing site, and are moving to Cassandra, a distributed, scalable "NoSQL" database. The move is another win for the NoSQL movement which looks to move from centralised SQL based databases to distributed key/value stores more suited to large scale web applications.

After twitter, now is Digg who decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Casandra, an opensource project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database.

For most of the Web era, Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) based on SQL have dominated the database landscape. But over the course of the last year, a new approach has begun to take hold known as NoSQL, offering an alternative to the traditional RDBMS.

The open source Apache CouchDB database project hit a major milestone this week with the release of version 0.11. The release is an important one for the NoSQL database variant as it matures toward its 1.0 release.

Postgres and Ingres co-founder Mike Stonebraker is positioning his new database management system as a relational alternative to NoSQL databases

SQL-based relational database management systems (RDBMS) are beginning to be challenged by a new movement of NoSQL databases. Among those NoSQL databases is the open source CouchDB...

Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems — and thus mySQL — has inspired a sort of tea party movement among open source advocates organized under the banner of NoSQL.

The rise of the NoSQL movement is also highly relevant in the context of open source software, however, especially in relation to two key issues related to open source software.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about NoSQL and provided a short overview of the landscape of non-relational databases. One that has become increasingly popular is Apache CouchDB, so I’d like to spend a couple weeks digging into it a bit and talking about why it’s so interesting. Before I do, it’s worth noting that Ubuntu 9.10 was just released and uses CouchDB under the hood.