Getting Started

Getting started with dynomite should be as easy as this.

  git clone git://github.com/cliffmoon/dynomite.git
  cd dynomite
  git submodule init
  git submodule update
  rake
  ./bin/dynomite start -c config.json

If your favorite language supports thrift, you can generate a client using the thrift interface definition in dynomite/if/dynomite.thrift. For instance, if you want to generate c++ bindings:

thrift —gen cpp ./if/dynomite.thrift

That will generate header and cpp files which can be integrated into your own project.

Using Dynomite

Using the ruby thrift client it should be as easy as this:

  require 'thrift'
  require 'thrift/transport/socket'
  require 'thrift/protocol/tbinaryprotocolaccelerated'
  require "gen-rb/Dynomite"
  socket = Thrift::Socket.new('localhost', 9200)
  socket.open
  protocol = Thrift::BinaryProtocolAccelerated.new(Thrift::BufferedTransport.new(socket))
  client = Dynomite::Client.new(protocol)
  client.put("a key", nil, "a value")
  get_result = client.get("a key")
  puts get_result.context
  puts get_result.results

The output from this will look a little something like this:

  [email protected]+09j
  a value

The first string is what’s called the context. This is a serialized piece of metadata that is meant to be opaque to the client application. When mutating a value the application code should pass this context in as the second parameter to a put request. It establishes a version history within dynomite to help reconcile consistency issues later. For instance, lets say you had marshalled a user object into dynomite and wanted to modify its email. You would do something like so.

  get = client.get(user_id)
  user = Marshal.load(get.results)
  user.email = new_email
  client.put(user_id, get.context, Marshal.dump(user))

When dynomite goes to do the update it will use the context information from the client in order to establish a common history between the replicas. This allows dynomite to distribute both read and write operations without having to coordinate transactions between nodes.