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Twitter opts for Open Source Cassandra system
Tuesday, 02 March 2010, 19:19 IST
Bangalore: Twitter has decided to use the open source Cassandra data management system instead of the MySQL database system. This is the latest of several MySQL replacements at social networking sites, according to Ryan King, a software engineer at Twitter, according to InformationWeek.
Cassandra can be run on large server clusters and is capable of taking in very large amounts of data at a time, performing sorts and calling up relevant data quickly. It's an example of the new types of data handling systems that are powering large Web applications, particularly social networking sites which deal with hundreds of thousands or millions of users.
King is quoted in an interview posted last week on the MyNoSQL blog stating that Twitter wanted a system that could keep up with its growth, as tweets have gone from 2 million a day to over 50 million in 2009. "We have a lot of data. The growth factor in that data is huge and the rate of growth is accelerating," he said in the blog posting. King also said in the interview that Twitter sought a system with no single point of failure, which could execute highly scalable writes, and had a healthy open source community behind it.
