How is Twitter's MySQL database architecture designed? Try your best

Question

No one knows. And even if you work at Twitter, you probably won't let us know the secret.

So, let us all post our theories on how this communication tool database is designed!

It definitely can't follow the standard replication architecture, right? It's got to do some sharding, partitioning, etc, etc.

Let me know what you think!

Solution 1

Twitter uses in memory database and MySQL is just for backup.

This is a diagram that might explain Twitter's architecture:

Solution 2

MySQL is not used for backup as mention in the previous answer but for actually storing the data.

They have developed their own database called FlockDB which uses mySQL as back-end database along with other mechanisms for consistency,indexing etc.

More information about FlockDB and source code here:

https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

But they have optimized their MySQL database schema in a way to perform extremely well with their queries.

More information about the schema here:

http://www.slideshare.net/nkallen/q-con-3770885?from=ss_embed