I made a Rails plugin as a kind of adapter for Tokyo Cabinet. Tokyo Cabinet, apart from having a funny name, is a database engine from (duh) Japan, allowing a few different data storage paradigms.

I got to know it through this post of Ilya Grigorik where he basically says it's blazingly fast. And when he says it's fast, I tend to believe him.

So what did I use it for ? I needed to do a multiple shortest path calculation, using the Floyd-Warshall algorithm. I figured storing intermediate results in a Tokyo B+Tree, and table database (for random-length paths) is certainly faster than storing it in your garden variety relational database. It's definitely slower than doing results in memory ... until it isn't. Storing everything in memory is not a good idea if you want your calculation to be scalable to any size of graph.

I wrote this small plugin tokyo_cabinet4r, which has no greater ambition than to make the use of Tokyo Cabinet in Rails easier, and to a certain extent similar to the use of ActiveRecord (using the Ruby API). If you have any suggestion at all, or you want to use it and a feature's lacking, let me know. I'll probably fine-tune and fiddle with it in the next few days, amongst other things.