royans

Most of us who deal with traditional databases take auto-increments for granted. While auto-increments are simple on consistent clusters, it can become a challenge in a cluster of independent nodes which don’t use the same source for the unique-ids. Even bigger challenge is to do it in such a way so that they are roughly in sequence. While this may be an old problem, I realized the importance of such a sequence only after using Cassandra in my own environment. Twitter, which has been using Cassandra in many interesting ways has proposed a solution for it which they are releasing as open source today. Here are some interesting sections from their post announcing “ Snowflake ”. The Problem We currently use MySQL to store most of our online data. In the beginning, the data was in one small database instance which in turn became one large database instance and eventually many large database clusters. For various reasons, the details of which merit a whole blog post, weâ€