Hypertable - press and traction

It's now been two weeks since we launched the 0.9 alpha of the Hypertable distributed database, and we've been a bit blown away with the excitement it's generated. The release got picked up on Slashdot (w00t!), in LinuxWorld, and just today, the 451 Group in the UK published another great piece. Meanwhile it's causing a little enthusiastic consternation in relational land -- my absolute favorite quote is from DBA4Life:

"HyperTable is sexy... yet, not relational... This is very confusing... I have to go now."

That's the sound of the world changing :-)

Most exciting, however is the level of engagment we've seen with the actual codebase, since that's where real open-source traction occurs. In addition to a vibrant mailing list, we're getting tons of feedback and bug reports - perhaps driven by the fact that in just two weeks, Hypertable has seen over 2600 downloads (!) -- of a 700MB tarball that you need significant skills to unpack and install. We're seeing all sorts of cool ideas about how this could be used, and look forward to many more.

Meanwhile, Zvents is laser-focused as always on the future of local search...