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Twitter open-sources its MySQL tweaks

Microblogging site reveals some of the enhancements it's made to the database technology it uses to store user-generated data.

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Steven Musil
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Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Twitter has open-sourced some of the numerous tweaks it has made to MySQL, the database technology that the microblogging site uses to store most of the data generated by its users.

"MySQL is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves," wrote Twitter developers Jeremy Cole and Davi Arnaut on the Twitter engineering blog. "Since we believe in sharing knowledge and that open source software facilitates innovation, we have decided to open source our MySQL work on GitHub under the BSD New license."

The code Twitter's team released focuses on adding more status variables; optimizing memory allocation on larger NUMA systems; improving server-side statement timeout support; exporting and restoring InnoDB buffer pool; and optimizing MySQL for SSD machines.

"We look forward sharing our work with upstream and other downstream MySQL vendors, with a goal to improve the MySQL community," the developers wrote.

Twitter plans to share more about its MySQL usage on Thursday at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo being held this week in Santa Clara, Calif. The company plans to discuss Gizzard -- the sharing and replication framework built on top of MySQL.