July

July 16, 2009

Need to scale Drupal on EC2? Check out Chapter Three's Mercury project

Josh Koenig from Chapter Three has made pre-release EC2 AMIs (pre-packaged virtual machine images) for Mercury, a project to combine Four Kitchens’ Drupal-derived, high-performance Pressflow with Varnish, Cache Router, and memcached. Initial results show it easily saturating the EC2’s pipe. Mercury instances directly update their Pressflow releases from the Four Kitchens Bazaar server.

Mercury is an exciting project for anyone who needs to run a high-traffic, Drupal-based site without having to configure a bunch of caching systems.

July 15, 2009

Giving schema back its good name

For modern applications, the word “schema” has become synonymous with the tables, columns, constraints, indexes, and foreign keys in a relational database management system. A typical relational schema affects physical concerns (like record layout on disk) and logical concerns (like the cascading deletion of records in related tables).

Schemas have gotten a bad name because current RDBMS tools give them these rotten attributes:

July 13, 2009

Pressflow 6 now offers direct downloads

For quite some time, Four Kitchens has provided Pressflow releases to its large-scale clients and anyone interested enough to request a copy. We provided limited access to copies so that we could understand what organizations expected of Pressflow, how they wanted to use it, and so that we could keep all users updated with the latest security, bug-fix, and feature releases.