Facebook: Why our 'next-gen' comms ditched MySQL

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/12/17/facebook_messages_tech/

by yarapavan • 16 years ago

68 16 16 years ago

channelregister.co.uk

sirclueless• 16 years ago

Why does this article contain the word "interwebs"?

lhnn• 16 years ago

This website is a derivative of "The Inquirer", which is known for its annoying jargon.

rwmj• 16 years ago

Actually the Inquirer "derived" in a sense from The Register, in that they were started serially by Mike Magee. I discover from Wikipedia that Magee has now gone on to found a third web magazine ...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Register#...

maheshs• 16 years ago

already submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018656

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/17/facebook_messages_te...

jfb2• 16 years ago

It doesn't sound like MySQL was ever in the running.

pjscott• 16 years ago

Why would it be? It's just not designed for this sort of job.

jfb2• 16 years ago

Right; it was more a comment on the headline than the content.

tapiwa• 16 years ago

The one good thing to take out of this is that Facebook made a measured decision, and ran with the best technology.

So easily (as many companies do) they could have taken a 'not invented here' decision and run with Cassandra.

biot3• 16 years ago

It's cool that Facebook uses HBase. But Looking at the HBase documentation at http://hbase.apache.org/docs/current/api/org/apache/hadoop/h... all the calls to Put, Get, Result, Scan, etc. have repeated calls to Byte.toBytes() to convert a string to bytes. Is there some peculiar reason why the API doesn't also have methods which take a string and do the byte conversion internally?

ddlatham3• 16 years ago

Many users of HBase (including ourselves) use different, more efficient encoding of values into byte arrays than converting them to String's first, then byte arrays. For example, it's common to use protobuf to encode an object into a byte array for storage in HBase.

Rather than have 2 copies of all the api methods (one for people storing just Strings, and one for arbitrary byte arrays), it's simpler to have a single call and let the caller use the Bytes.toBytes method if they want to store a String.

biot3• 16 years ago

That makes sense for the values, but the names of rows and columns are also passed as bytes. Wouldn't a convenience function that accepts strings, performs the Bytes.toBytes() conversion and calls the original method reduce code clutter?

nivertech• 16 years ago

It looks like HBase developers were working hard to design the most verbose API possible ;)

ddlatham3• 16 years ago

It's a huge vote of confidence for HBase that the creators of Cassandra would choose it and its simple strong consistency model.

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

I like that they prototyped and measured. Also: for messaging FB needed consistency; for some applications Cassandra would make more sense.

Facebook: Why our 'next-gen' comms ditched MySQL

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