We've been discussing design of a data warehouse strategy within our group for meeting testing, reproducibility, and data syncing requirements. One of the suggested ideas is to adapt a NoSQL approach using an existing tool rather than try to re-implement a whole lot of the same on a file system. I don't know if a NoSQL approach is even the best approach to what we're trying to accomplish but perhaps if I describe what we need/want you all can help.
- Most of our files are large, 50+ Gig in size, held in a proprietary, third-party format. We need to be able to access each file by a name/date/source/time/artifact combination. Essentially a key-value pair style look-up.
- When we query for a file, we don't want to have to load all of it into memory. They're really too large and would swamp our server. We want to be able to somehow get a reference to the file and then use a proprietary, third-party API to ingest portions of it.
- We want to easily add, remove, and export files from storage.
- We'd like to set up automatic file replication between two servers (we can write a script for this.) That is, sync the contents of one server with another. We don't need a distributed system where it only appears as if we have one server. We'd like complete replication.
- We also have other smaller files that have a tree type relationship with the Big files. One file's content will point to the next and so on, and so on. It's not a "spoked wheel," it's a full blown tree.
We'd prefer a Python, C or C++ API to work with a system like this but most of us are experienced with a variety of languages. We don't mind as long as it works, gets the job done, and saves us time. What you think? Is there something out there like this?