One of the things that's been keeping me up at night lately is this new project I've been researching and developing. SimpleStore is a way to store Python objects (in the future that will change to JSON objects) in sharded MySQL databases. The idea is that it lets developers scale their web applications, but honestly it hasn't been used on a site of any real scale yet since it's still very new.

SimpleStore is cool as a beta project for using with your own database servers. What would be even better is to take the ideas from SimpleStore and create a service that web developers can use for remote database storage. This is what's been really keeping me up at night. I've been doing research on distributed database systems and I think with my experience from writing SimpleStore I will be able to develop something pretty neat.

I won't turn SimpleStore into a cloud-based service, but the ideas from SimpleStore will help me create a truly distributed database system. If this service turns into something I can put online, I hope it creates another option for web developers looking for easy-to-use cloud database systems.

Also, I updated SimpleStore to version 0.3. That update adds MySQL sharding support. You can grab it here: simplestore-0.3.tar.gz