Facebook wall's database structure

Question

I need to create a wall system just like Facebook's (users can post messages, videos, images, events, etc...). Has anyone created something similar? How do you recommend me to prepare the database?

Answer 1

Facebook doesn't use an RDBMS for their data management.

They use a non-relational technology called Map/Reduce, included in the Hadoop project. They built a project called Hive to query the data with an SQL-like language. They also built Cassandra, another high-scale, non-relational data management technology.

Check out:

• "Data Management, Facebook-style"
• "Hive - A Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hadoop"

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By the way, Facebook does use MySQL too, just not for the stuff that needs to be highly scalable. I just saw a blog post announcing that Facebook contributes patches back to the MySQL project, and they have a public Launchpad site called mysqlatfacebook and also a Facebook site called MySQLatFacebook.