Sinking in too many layers

Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..]

Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also based on a piece of Google’s backend. Google uses a proprietary distributed database known as BigTable that runs atop the Google File System (GFS) system, and it published a paper on the technology in 2006. In echo of the Hadoop project, Facebook leaned on the paper in building Cassandra.

But Cassandra isn’t a pure BigTable mimic. Facebook applied BigTable’s data model to the Dynamo distributed storage system developed by Amazon for its S3 storage service, part of the retailer’s increasingly popular Web Services cloud. Cassandra’s authors included Avinash Lakshman, who helped build Dynamo at Amazon. Register