Inside Facebook

Facebook has released another big project to the open source community: Cassandra, a storage system for folks dealing with high traffic database concurrency bottlenecks (like you might be dealing with if you were operating a large social network, for instance). According to Mike Gunderjoy,

What you’ll find is a system that is carefully designed to get around the problems of high-traffic, highly-normalized relational databases. Features of Cassandra include denormalizing everything to one huge table with column groups, replication among multiple nodes, predictable low write times, delayed consistency, and built-in health monitoring.

Cassandra was built by Jeff Hammerbacher’s data group – Hammerbacher recently announced he was leaving the company. Here’s a recent SIGMOD presentation on Cassandra’s features and architecture:

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