Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores via High Scalability – Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites. by Todd Hoff on 1/19/09

Richard Jones has put together a very nice list of various key-value stores around the internets. The list includes: Project Voldemort, Ringo, Scalaris, Kai, Dynomite, MemcacheDB, ThruDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, HBase, and Hypertable. Richard also includes some commentary and their basic components (language, fault tolerance, persistence, client protocol, data model, docs, community).

There’s an excellent discussion in the comments of Paxos vs Vector Clock techniques for synchronizing writes in the face of network failures.