Alaric is the Chief Software Architect of GenieDB, a fully replicated distributed database that provides SQL and NoSQL functionality with inter-table joins to help developers use database more effectively and efficiently. He has designed distributed systems and worked on high-load and large-scale server clusters for over 15 years. His experience ranges from implementing low-level SQL optimization to developing peer-to-peer media distribution technologies. He is a freelance technical editor and author for QUE Books.

Alaric graduated from Imperial College with a Bachelor of Engineering with Honors in Computer Science. He enjoys working with children and has been a Cub Scout Leader for 3 years.

Contributions

• CloudTV: SQL vs NoSQL - January 2010
  
  
  
• Presentation: SQL vs NoSQL - January 2010
  Alaric Snell-Pym from GenieDB talks about the pros and cons of SQL and NoSQL. It's not a simple case of one or the other. The question is: Should we be abandoning ACID properties and the standard SQL interface?
  
  
• Paper: GenieDB Technology Overview White Paper - 2009
  Over the past few years, "scaling" and "availability" have come to vie with "cutting costs" and "delivering new features" as major headaches for the CTOs of online businesses. With Moore's Law starting to lose steam, existing applications can no longer be scaled by simply buying faster hardware each year; instead, scaling an application has become an exercise in rebuilding it to utilize techniques such as sharding or non-SQL databases, while struggling to keep the existing live system going despite rising load, before users start leaving in frustration.
  
  But the outlook isn't that bleak. "Clustering", a suite of technologies built around the concept of a group of independent servers co-operating to provide a service, has the potential to cut costs and provide scaling and availability in one fell swoop (sadly, however, they can't really help you deliver new features).
  
  In this white paper we will illustrate the challenges of applying cluster computing solutions to online application problems, and how the latest technologies address those challenges.