Emre Sokullu

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After long hours of research and a heated debate at our office, I've finally come to a conclusion on the difference between 2 fairly new  open source projects that are being used by Facebook too; Hive and Cassandra.

Cassandra: (=BigTable=HBase) saves computational power and time (by indexing with a column based approach) but is a resource hog when it comes to storage.
Hive: doesn't consume that much storage space bit responds slowlier.

So how they are in use at Facebook.

As far as we were able to figure out, friend recommendations are produced by Hive. Hive computations are done by cronjobs. Cassandra is in use when immediate responsiveness becomes a requirement. So for example, for the inbox system.

Know more than that? Have any input on how they are being used? Please let me know in the comments.

After long hours of research and a heated debate at our office, I've finally come to a conclusion on the difference between 2 fairly new  open source projects that are being used by Facebook too; Hive and Cassandra.

Cassandra: (=BigTable=HBase) saves computational power and time (by indexing with a column based approach) but is a resource hog when it comes to storage.
Hive: doesn't consume that much storage space bit responds slowlier.

So how they are in use at Facebook.

As far as we were able to figure out, friend recommendations are produced by Hive. Hive computations are done by cronjobs. Cassandra is in use when immediate responsiveness becomes a requirement. So for example, for the inbox system.

Know more than that? Have any input on how they are being used? Please let me know in the comments.