Is it Oracle or MySQL or something they have built themselves?
+25
A:
It's something they've built themselves - it's called Bigtable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable
There is a paper by Google on the database:
Mark Ingram
2008-12-12 14:49:52
Do anyone know if it was that built from scratch or based on some product? I heard somewhere I don't remember where, that google used Oracle once, but they drop it because they need some modifications that Oracle won't do nor allow them to do. I'll try to get the link.
OscarRyz
2009-02-25 21:12:39
holy crap that's a thorough answer
jcollum
2009-03-04 01:32:10
It's from scratch, like most of their other core competencies (web server, GFS, ...).
Matt J
2009-03-14 08:17:01
+8
A:
Although Google uses BigTable for all their main applications, they also use MySQL for other (perhaps minor) apps.
Mauricio Scheffer
2008-12-12 15:05:23
see http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/12/lets-get-real-database.html
smoothdeveloper
2008-12-12 17:44:10
@smoothdeveloper's link is dead; read an archived copy here: http://web.archive.org/web/20071102233627/http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/12/lets-get-real-database.html
josh3736
2010-07-21 20:25:59
+11
A:
As others have mentioned, Google uses a homegrown solution called BigTable and they've released a few papers describing it out into the real world.
The Apache folks have an implementation of the ideas presented in these papers called HBase. HBase is part of the larger Hadoop project which according to their site "is a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data." Some of the benchmarks are quite impressive. Their site is at http://hadoop.apache.org.
EvilRyry
2008-12-12 15:11:14
+5
A:
And it's maybe also handy to know that BigTable is not a relational database (like MySQL) but a huge (distributed) hash table which has very different characteristics. You can play around with (a limited version) of BigTable yourself on the Google AppEngine platform.
Next to Hadoop mentioned above there are many other implementations that try to solve the same problems as BigTable (scalability, availability). I saw a nice blog post yesterday listing most of them here.
Koen Bok
2009-01-20 13:49:10