Why is facebook not using cassandra

I generally like and agree with Joel. Really, I do. But it's been my experience that working code is not enough.

If that code is not proven robust, and if that code is core to what you do, and if noone in your organization knows how it works, that code cannot be left alone until the day one of its inputs or dependencies causes it to fail. That risk is typically greater than the one you will take in sending someone into that code with the mission of 1 understand it and 2 if it's cryptic and arcane, make it less so. There is the 3rd option of 3 take all that custom stuff we wrote, like MyCompanyLinkedList, and point it at a 3rd party library so the code base we are talking about shrinks to the core logic we are selling.

I'm certainly not trying to fully contradict Joel's observations, but I think they are far too broadly applied. Just my perspective on this, though. Most of Social networks like Facebook has stopped using mysql as main database and switched to use Cassandra or other no-sql DB. And we can consider this change as big grow for this new open-source data store, Cassandra, which was developed originally by Facebook to solve the problem of inbox search and to be fast, reliable and had the ability to handle read and write requests at the same time source: Why does large Social Network projects switch to use Cassandra instead of Mysql?

Notify me of follow-up comments via email. Explain the Cloud Like I'm All Time Favorites. Real Life Architectures. Support in Patreon. Start Here. All Posts. Amazon Store. Recent Posts. Jul 11 Sunday, July 11, at AM. But this is my most favorite flow chart of all time, so it's worth it :- Is Twitter really abandoning Cassandra? This may be something like the thought process Twitter went through in making their decision: Flow Chart for Project Decision Making I still get a laugh everytime I read it.

Why are Facebook, Digg, and Twitter so hard to scale? Reader Comments 19 Did Do you not know what a failwhale is? July 11, John Haugeland. July 11, ryan. July 11, Todd Hoff. July 11, Tim Haines. July 11, spacelee. That's not so good. July 12, MIke. July 12, JG Wentworth. If you want to search in Cassandra, I've been told that you need to use something like ElasticSearch or Solr. The basic idea is that you use the user id as the partition key, and then all the information you need for an inbox search will be clustered as rows in that partition.

You can then set up multiple tables like this with different types of data clustered in the partition to support different types of searches. Since Cassandra can access a partition in essentially constant time even with millions of users, the system can scale and remain fast as you add nodes and users. You can read a description of the initial system here in section 6.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How did FaceBook use Cassandra for inbox search, if Caasandra has no search capabilities? A Perfect Storm Cassandra at Twitter Today. Amazons Dynamo. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel.

Carousel Previous. Carousel Next. What is Scribd? Cassandra As Used by Facebook. Did you find this document useful? Is this content inappropriate? Report this Document. Flag for inappropriate content. Download now. Original Title: Cassandra as Used by Facebook. Related titles. Carousel Previous Carousel Next. Cassandra Internals Overview by Sam Tunnicliffe 1. Jump to Page. Search inside document. How Facebook Uses Cassandra Facebook created Cassandra to power their inbox search, and this is still where it is used today.

Scalability One of the important factors when talking about scalability is the method used for dealing with new nodes either due to the expansion of the data processing and storage or due to the node outage failures or maintenance tasks.

The picture below will illustrate the structure of super columns: [Ham07] Fault tolerance For Cassandra fault tolerance is a very important concern, it starts as soon as a piece of data is inputted to the system. Cassandra vs. Future and Conclusion These problems were unfortunate, but Cassandra isnt to blame for everything. Arunkumar Palathumpattu. Rajul Srivastava. Venkatraman Krishnamoorthy. Pooja Sharma. Phani Kumar. Saeed Meethal. Derek Young.

Anonymous gqSpNAmlW. Nag Dhall. Ravi Pinni. Camilo Espinoza Molina. Vasi Hojda. Sharkup Laser. Marco Antonio Martinez Andrade. Packt Publishing. Vskills Certification. Anderson Faria Santos. Popular in Databases. Saif Muhammad Anwar. Neelesh Kamath. Ba Hoang. Sashi Kumar. Vijayalakshmi Jayaprakash. Anand Biradar. Rohit S. Naveen Vuppala. Sergio Herzel. Rajat Awasthi. Tasnia Yasmin. Soon, even Rackspace was behind the plan.

The company not only gave its blessing to their new venture, but provided seed money as well. Having seen the power of Cassandra first hand, Rackspaceand two of its key employeesknew how useful it could be to other operations struggling to accommodate ever increasing amounts of online data. And, now, four years later, their leap of faith has paid off in big ways. Today, their startup, DataStax , is part of a growing flock of companies that are remaking the multi-million database market and slowly loosening the grip of software giant Oracle.

Unlike traditional databases, like those from Oracle, Cassandra and its peers are specifically designed to run across a vast cluster of machines, juggling huge amounts of data, and that's what the modern world needs.

Though Facebook has all but abandoned Cassandra, the technology has gone on to power critical web infrastructure at companies like Twitter, Netflix, even Apple. And DataStax has built a version of the tool for all sorts of other businesses. Facebook engineers Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik originally built Cassandra to power the engine that let you search your inbox on the social network.

Like other so-called "NoSQL" databases, it did away with the traditional relational modelwhere data is organized in neat rows and columns on a single machinein order to more easily scale across thousands of machines.

That's vitally important for a growing web service the size of Facebook. Lakshman had worked on Amazon's distributed data storage system called Dynamo, but the two also drew inspiration from a paper Google published in describing its internal database BigTable.