Facebook trapped in MySQL death trap

Internet • July 2011 • Views: 2,373

According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”

Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions.

During an interview this week, Stonebraker explained to me that Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve. I’m checking with Facebook to verify the accuracy of those numbers, but Facebook’s history with MySQL is no mystery.

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4 comments

eightyfiv Sun, Jul 10, 2011 2:06:51pm

This is indeed a common kludge. Even Google does it too, for certain applications. It sucks, and there's obviously a better way, it just doesn't happen to be easy or cheap (i.e., not free as in free beer) when you are small.

Stonebraker is notorious for bravado, exaggeration, and "tooting his own horn", though, so take the "death trap" epithet with a grain of salt. It hasn't killed Google's advertising systems yet, either.

It's also not the only growing pains kludge these companies get themselves into. Facebook engineering higher-ups have described PHP (and not MySQL) to me as their single biggest technological albatross. The HipHip compiler is their latest and greatest kludge attempting to get that under control.

Velvet Elvis Sun, Jul 10, 2011 2:22:08pm

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.

Has anyone told Oracle yet?

eightyfiv Sun, Jul 10, 2011 3:41:15pm

re: #2 Conservative Moonbat

Stonebraker's still bitter that his Quel got beaten out by IBM's SQL back in the '80s. He misses no opportunity trash-talk. :P

Jaerik Sun, Jul 10, 2011 4:56:11pm

It's not MySQL's fault. It's about as good as they come where relational databases are concerned. Same with MSSQL and Oracle.

The problem is, a lot of what people do online these days doesn't require data to be relational. Document-oriented DB's like Mongo, key-value stores like Redis, etc, are sometimes a much better fit for certain applications, especially text-heavy simple lookups.

There's really no need to invite the overhead of a relational DB when you're never going to be doing those kinds of operations. The problem is finding developers who know anything but LAMP.

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