NOSQL – so hot right now. As part of my own learning curve, I’m building a simple abstract and schema-less Factory Patterned CRUD class for Cassandra, and shoe-horning it in with Apache Thrift.  There’s a very thorough blog by Evan Weaver to help dealing with the RDBMS to Cassandra conceptual jump. If you haven’t dealt with Cassandra before, it may be a good place to start. For a very decent cluster setup example, check here, and for Thrift just grab the source and follow the instructions I guess, but if you’re using debian/ubuntu I’ve written a quick install guide.

Dubbed Pandra, it will be maintained via github. Requires PHP 5.2, Cassandra 0.4, and latest Thrift Interface.