By Kyle Krenbrink
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-07-14
Facebook may on the brink of a crisis and trapped in a MySQL "Fate Worse than Death." The entire social platform is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation that stands to cripple the social giant. According to Micahel Stonebraker the only possibility is to rewrite everything from scratch.
In Stonebraker's opinion, "old SQL (as he calls it) is good for nothing" and needs to be "sent to the home for retired software." After all, he explained, SQL was created decades ago before the web, mobile devices and sensors forever changed how and how often databases are accessed.The widely accepted issue with MySQL is that by virtue of its design, it was never intended to process the colossal amounts of transactions required for huge webscale applications and the huge amounts of calls that are required. The biggest problem with MySQL and other SQL databases is that they consume too many resources for overhead tasks.
Facebook has split its SQL database into 4000 shards in order to handle the massive amount of data and is currently running 9000 instances of memcache in order to keep up to the massive number of calls that the database must serve. In 2008, they were employing over 1800 server dedicated to MySQL and over 800 dedicated to memcache.
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