How Twitter Is Moving To the Cassandra Database

MyNoSQL has up an interview with Ryan King on how Twitter is transitioning to the Cassandra database. Here's some detailed background on Cassandra, which aims to "bring together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model." Before settling on Cassandra, the Twitter team looked into: "...HBase, Voldemort, MongoDB, MemcacheDB, Redis, Cassandra, HyperTable, and probably some others I'm forgetting. ... We're currently moving our largest (and most painful to maintain) table — the statuses table, which contains all tweets and retweets. ... Some side notes here about importing. We were originally trying to use the BinaryMemtable interface, but we actually found it to be too fast — it would saturate the backplane of our network. We've switched back to using the Thrift interface for bulk loading (and we still have to throttle it). The whole process takes about a week now. With infinite network bandwidth we could do it in about 7 hours on our current cluster." Relatedly, an anonymous reader notes that the upcoming NoSQL Live conference, which will take place in Boston March 11th, has announced their lineup of speakers and panelists including Ryan King and folks from LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Rackspace.

Don't believe them!

[smellsofbikes]

They keep saying that the Cassandra database is better, but somehow I don't believe them. I can't imagine they know what they're talking about. Maybe in the long-term they'll be proven right but I really don't think they are. I don't know why, though...

heh heh heh.

Cassandra, eh?

[maugle]

I hear Cassandra can even predict when disastrous system failures are going to occur! Unfortunately, for some reason nobody ever believes the warnings.

Re:And this is front page news, why?

[BarryJacobsen]

Why is it that whenever twitter makes any random change to some part of its infrastructure that we need a front page story about it?

Because the change prevented them from posting it to twitter.

Re:Cassandra, eh?

[einhverfr]

Especially when trojan horses are the cause of such a disaster....

Don't want to install Cassandra

[einhverfr]

I hear Cassandra is really a trojan. Can anyone verify? I don't want a trojan on my computer.....

Re:network issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

you just need to get bigger, faster pipes

That's what she said!

Re:Java / JVM Wins Again ...

[codepunk]

Until recently I thought the same way, I would never endorse a solution that involves java. However
a recently came to the same realization that sun did when they created it. Java is a fantastic
way to over sell gobs of expensive hardware. I am a system administrator so the more hardware it takes to
run a solution the better off I am, more machines, more money and better job security. So I have now
fully jumped on the java bandwagon, java makes me smile.