Why We Chose MongoDB for Guardian.co.uk (SlideShare) — they’re using MongoDB’s flexible schema, as schema upgrades were pain in their previous system (Oracle). I think of these as the database equivalent of dynamic typing in languages like Perl and Ruby. (via Paul Rowe)
Solving Problems with Visual Analytics — This book is the result of a community effort of the partners of the VisMaster Coordinated Action funded by the European Union. The overarching aim of VisMaster was to create a research roadmap that outlines the current state of visual analytics across many disciplines, and to describe the next steps that have to be taken to foster a strong visual analytics community, thus enabling the development of advanced visual analytic applications. (via Mark Madsen)
iOS-Couchbase (GitHub) — a build of distributed key-value store CouchDB, which will keep your mobile data in sync with a remote store. No mean feat given CouchDB itself has Erlang as a dependency. (via Mike Olson)
SimString — A fast and simple algorithm for approximate string retrieval in C++ with Python and Ruby bindings, opensourced with modified BSD license. (via Matt Biddulph)