Igvita shares the details on ThruDB, another take on the document storage paradigm.

Article: ThruDB, faster and cheaper than SimpleDB

The architecture sound incredible. Amongst others there is the rank and file of the high scalability open source software such as memcached, spread, CLucene and facebook’s newcomer thrift for wire protocols.

ThruDB is able to use Amazon S3 as a permanent data store which makes it an ideal fit for EC2 installations. For quick document access its able to utilize the local disks and even memcached.

Everything about ThruDB’s design is genius. The innovation here is that it separates the concerns of permanent document storage and querys. For querying documents it uses the lucene fulltext search engine. CLucene is naturally more suited for the requirements of a web application. SQL cannot compete with the quality and features of lucene for query and lookup.

In the end you have something more safe, more scalable and much faster than a traditional RBMS with the added benefit of world class full text search.

Cheers Jake.