Digg Replaces MySQL With NoSQL

6 Comments » Share

From last six months Digg has been working to switch from the MySQL environment to a NoSQL BigTable solution. And now along with rewriting the majority of their site’s code using Cassandra DB, they are also rolling out a new client and server architecture. Cassandra is selected from other open-source NoSQL solutions, comprising CouchDB and MongoDB. They have replaced their infrastructure components and moving away from LAMP, which is quite a challenging task.

John Quinn, VP of Engineering at Digg, wrote -

Digg is committed to the use and development of open source software and we’re keen to avoid the cost of proprietary large-scale storage solutions. We were inspired by Google and Amazon’s broad use of their non-relational BigTable and Dynamo systems. We evaluated all the usual open source NoSQL suspects. After considerable debate, we decided to go with Cassandra.

During this test period, a tool called Transcribe has been developed to migrate content from MySQL to Cassandra. This tool is expected to be launched as open source after Digg finishes its migration. However, MySQL would not be completely phased out during this process, being yet used in Digg’s small-scale projects due to its high flexibility and rapid prototyping.