Covered this and several other techniques here: http://www.slideshare.net/quipo/trees-in-the-database-advanc...

Micro-benchmarks are useless. A better approach:

http://www.slideshare.net/quipo/profile-your-php-application...

http://blip.tv/phpnw/phpnw10-lorenzo-alberton-profile-your-p...

@geuis: the cost for 1000 tweets is $0.10, and that's the Twitter license fee. You get $10 in free credits when you sign up, and you can have an On Demand plan starting from $10. It should definitely make it very affordable to anyone wanting to play with the Twitter firehose, the barrier-to-entry has never been so low.

Apologies for the extremely flat and boring tone of voice and the somewhat rushed comparison of the actual products. Next time I'll do better, promise :)

Some notes to introduce the slides: http://www.alberton.info/nosql_databases_what_when_why_phpuk...