The database houses essential information about the more than 500 million people who have accounts on the social network. With about half of the members logging on daily, the system is incredibly busy — understatement! So it’s hardly a surprise that Facebook has three different teams of techies caring for the SQL installation: operations, performance and engineering groups, to be exact.
The level of service that Facebook demands from this database calls for special tweaks. The social network has its own patch for MySQL and engineering team continues to upgrade this software. The evolution of this development will be part of the presentation tomorrow night.
Most open-source software comes in a free version, with more advanced ones costing money. MySQL has three levels of paid subscriptions, and the most advanced one prices at $10,000 a year for one to four sockets. The most advanced one boasts the kinds of features that Facebook needs:
Whether you’re racing to introduce a new service, or trying to manage an avalanche of data in real time, your database has to be scalable, fast and highly available to meet ever-changing market conditions and stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
MySQL Cluster is the industry’s only real-time transactional relational database combining 99.999% availability with the low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of open source. It features a “shared-nothing” distributed architecture with no single point of failure to assure high availability and performance, allowing you to meet your most demanding mission-critical application requirements.
MySQL Cluster’s real-time design delivers predictable, millisecond response times with the ability to service tens of thousands of transactions per second. Support for in-memory and disk based data, automatic data partitioning with load balancing and the ability to add nodes to a running cluster with zero downtime allows linear database scalability to handle the most unpredictable workloads.
MySQL Cluster delivers carrier-grade availability and performance, with the flexibility of open source software
MySQL Cluster eliminates the need for expensive shared storage, and runs on a range of commodity platforms, making it the most open and cost-effective database solution for mission critical applications.
The discussion of Facebook’s database deployment seems like the a brilliant response to news of the minor dip in Facebook’s availability rate this past quarter. The timing of the presentation couldn’t be better: this social network has a lot more demand put on it than much of the competition, and what better way is there to make the point than to lift up the hood?
Source: All Facebook
Monday, November 1, 2010