If you want to stay in touch with cutting-edge technology in terms of scalability of databases, high traffic sites, and large storage volumes, you should read these two articles on the new hstack.org blog.
Cosmin Lehene wrote two excellent articles on Adobe’s experiences with HBase: Why we’re using HBase: Part 1 and Why we’re using HBase: Part 2. Adobe needed a generic, real-time, structured data storage and processing system that could handle any data volume, with access times under 50ms, with no downtime and no data loss. The article goes into great detail about their experiences with HBase and their evaluation process, providing a “well reasoned impartial use case from a commercial user”. It talks about failure handling, availability, write performance, read performance, random reads, sequential scans, and consistency.
(via High Scalability)