Inside Facebook’s Open Graph
The mid-part of this Wired article talks a bit about the way Facebook is storing its Open Graph data:
We have an object store, which stores things like users and events and groups and photos, and then we have an edge store that stores the relationship between objects. With Open Graph, we built a layer on top of those systems that allowed developers to define what their objects look like and what their edges look like and then publish those third party objects and edges into the same infrastructure that we used to store all of the first party objects and edges.
Couple of thoughts:
- this data is a good example of a multigraph
- I don’t think Facebook is actually using a graph database for storing the data. Considering the size of the data Facebook is handling, this could be understandable
- There’s no mention of how the metadata, the description of the objects and edges, is stored. I assume this should somehow be connected to historical data to allow the evolution of the data while maintaining its original meaning over time.
- The processing happening on this multigraph data sounds like cluster analysis
Original title and link: Inside Facebook’s Open Graph (©myNoSQL)
