Facebook has revealed details about Tao, its multi-petabyte data store for the company's social graph. Though Facebook's social network may have little relevance for IT pros, its internal infrastructure does, because here the social network is dealing with quantities of information so vast that it has to come up with new ways …

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Thursday 27th June 2013 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward

Potential law suit over the name incoming in 10 ... 9 ... 8 ...

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html (the name's a trademark).

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1. Monday 1st July 2013 23:39 GMT Destroy All Monsters
  
  Nah. "Tao" is about as generic as "Windows". There are about 394 search results at the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS)...
  
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Thursday 27th June 2013 09:55 GMT Anonymous Coward

Not quite sure what the fuss is about

I've worked on data warehouses which can offer similar and better performance.

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1. Thursday 27th June 2013 16:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Not quite sure what the fuss is about
  
  Posting Anon for some obvious reasons...
  
  First TAO isn't really a data warehouse. Its a way of abstracting out the underlying MySQL as the pull data from MySQL stores in to HDFS which in itself isn't really a data warehouse.
  
  From the article:
  
  ""The fact Tao is using MySQL is completely hidden away from the client," Facebook director of engineering Venkat Venkataramani, tells The Register. "We haven't found anything that is better than MySQL, we are constantly looking at that.""
  
  This isn't totally true.
  
  There are better solutions, however they don't want to pay for it and they will of course want an open source product which they can hack.
  
  In truth, they will need to do a massive re-architecture of their infrastructure in order to replace their reliance on their MySQL sharded machines.
  
  Because FB doesn't think beyond the short term fix... er hack as they call it... they are going to have problems trying to solve things for the long game.
  
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Thursday 27th June 2013 11:04 GMT Robert Grant

Sounds good, but what's new?

I've dealt with some fairly large systems and it'd be nice if the reporter explained what was new about this system. Sharded database+big caching layer? What's new about this implementation?

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Thursday 27th June 2013 14:04 GMT RcR

BS

Sounds like BS to me; FB is really nothing more than the old '80s message boards sans the dialup modem

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1. Thursday 27th June 2013 16:46 GMT Ian Michael Gumby
  
  Re: BS
  
  There may be some truth to it. Think of it as AOL 2.0. Oh wait, AOL did a 2.0 upgrade so lets call it AOL 3.0
  
  Unlike AOL, FB can be free because they've figured out a way to monetize their user base in to information.
  
  But like AOL... unless they can constantly keep the attention of 200+ million human 'batteries', they will fail.
  
  (That was a Matrix movie reference BTW)
  
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