It is quite amazing that the oldest group of medically useful antibiotics, the fJ-Iactams, are still providing basic microbiologists, biochemists, and clinicians with surprises over 50 years after Fleming's discovery of penicillin production by Penicillium. By the end of the 1950s, the future of the penicillins seemed doubtful as resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus began to increase in hospital populations. However, the development of semisynthetic penicillins provided new structures with resistance to penicillinase and with broad-spectrum activity. In the 1960s, the discovery of cephalosporin C production by Cephalosporium and its conversion to valuable broad-spectrum antibiotics by semisynthetic means excited the world of chemotherapy. In the early 1970s, the 40-year-old notion that fJ-Iactams were produced only by fungi was destroyed by the discovery of cephamycin production by Streptomyces. Again this basic discovery was exploited by the deVelopment of the semisynthetic cefoxitin, which has even broader activity than earlier fJ-Iactams. Later in the 1970s came the discoveries of nocardicins from Nocardia, clavulanic acid from Streptomyces, and the carbapenems from Streptomyces. Now in the 1980s we learn that fJ-Iactams are produced even by unicellular bacteria and that semisynthetic derivatives of these monobactams may find their way into medicine. Indeed, the future of the prolific fJ-Iactam family seems brighter with each passing decade.

Today's highly interactive websites pose a challenge for traditional SQL databases - the ability to scale rapidly and serve loads of concurrent users. With this concise guide, you'll learn how to build web applications on top of Couchbase Server 2.0, a NoSQL database that can handle websites and social media where hundreds of thousands of users read and write large volumes of information. Using food recipe information as examples, this book demonstrates how to take advantage of Couchbase's document-oriented database design, and how to store and query data with various CRUD operations. Discover why Couchbase is better than SQL databases with memcached tiers for managing data from the most interactive portions of your application. Learn about Couchbase Server's cluster-based architecture and how it differs from SQL databases Choose a client library for Java, .N ET, Ruby, Python, PHP, or C, and connect to a cluster Structure data in a variety of formats, from serialized objects, a stream of raw bytes, or as JSON documents Learn core storage and retrieval methods, including document IDs, expiry times, and concurrent updates Create views with map/reduce and learn Couchbase mechanisms for querying and selection

Do you know what to do if your web application goes viral and usage suddenly explodes? This concise guide introduces you to Couchbase Server, an extremely fast NoSQL database that automatically distributes data across a cluster of commodity servers or virtual machines. You'll learn hands-on how to build a Couchbase cluster without changing your application, and how to expand your database on the fly without interrupting service.

Discover how this open source server can help your application gain scalability and performance.Learn how the server's architecture affects the way you build and deploy your databaseStore data without defining a data structure--and retrieve it without complex queries or query languagesUse a formula to estimate your cluster size requirementsSet up individual nodes through a browser, command line, or REST APIEnable your application to read and write data with sub-millisecond latency through managed object cachingGet a quick guide to building applications that integrate Couchbase's core protocolIdentify problems in your cluster with the web consoleExpand or shrink your cluster, handle failovers, and back up data

This concise guide contain everything you need to begin storing and retrieving information through CouchDB. You'll learn the basic of this document-oriented database, including its simple model for storing, processing, and accessing data. CouchDB is ideal for real-world items, such as contacts, invoices, and receipts, but you'll discover that this database can easily handle data of any kind.