Reconceiving the Web as a Distributed Data System

Nearly every Web request is a request for information from a database or a front-end caching system for one. Based on this concept, we can reconceive the Web as a large-scale distributed data system using NoSQL query languages across high-level protocols such as HTTP. Exploring this idea further leads us to a better understanding of the structure of the Web, and invites us to apply modern NoSQL thinking toward making it better. My goal is to re-orient people’s thinking toward the Web as a big NoSQL data system and then explore the implications.

Daniel Austin is Principal Architect and Member of the Technical Staff at Paypal, where he is focused on large-scale payment systems. In a past life, he's worked for organizations such as CERN, NASA, W3C, Sun, and Yahoo! in pursuit of making the Internet faster and smarter. He lives in Northern California.