Newly-released web applications often succumb to a "Success Disaster," where
overloaded database machines and resulting high response times destroy a
previously good user experience. Unfortunately, the data independence provided
by a traditional relational database system, while useful for agile
development, only exacerbates the problem by hiding potentially expensive
queries under simple declarative expressions.
Collaborative web applications such as Facebook, Flickr and Yelp present new
challenges for storing and querying large amounts of data. As users and
developers are focused more on performance than single copy consistency or the
ability to perform ad-hoc queries, there exists an opportunity for a
highly-scalable system tailored specifically for relaxed consistency and
pre-computed queries.