TAO - Facebook’s Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph

Explore Facebook's distributed data store for the social graph in this conference talk from USENIX ATC '13. Dive into the TAO system, designed to efficiently handle Facebook's demanding workload with a simple data model and API. Learn about its geographically distributed architecture, capable of processing billions of reads and millions of writes per second. Discover how TAO replaced memcache for many data types, its implementation across thousands of machines, and its ability to provide timely access to petabytes of social graph data. Gain insights into the system's challenges, including bottlenecks, leader cache, timelines, read availability, and database maintenance. Understand the constraints, API model, and failure semantics of TAO, as well as its approach to consistency and deep traversal. Conclude with a Q&A session addressing topics such as the use of MySQL, nodes, datastore workload, and more.