Twitter moves from MySQL to Apache’s Cassandra database

Posted on February 28, 2010 | Category: Apache, Cassandra, Database, Informational, Resources, Social Media, Twitter

In a recent interview on the blog MyNoSQL, Twitter engineer Ryan King said a migration from MySQL to Apache’s Cassandra database (db) is in the works. The move comes at a time when Twitter’s growth has cause significant heart-ache for the IT and other staff. In the last 12 months, Twitter was down for 84 hours. That is an agonizing period of down-time for one of the most popular social networking sites on the net.

The main reasons for migrating include

No single points of failure
Highly scalable writes
A health and productive open-source community

King said that “over time [Twitter will move their] largest table – the statuses table, which will contain all tweets and retweets.” After that migration, new projects will be placed on Cassandra and further tables will be migrated.

Resources

Up and running with Cassandra

Cassandra in prodcution

Computerworld