Research

We introduce a simple data model and API tailored for serving the social graph, and TAO, an implementation of this model. TAO is a geographically distributed data store that provides efficient and timely access to the social graph for Facebook’s demanding workload using a fixed set of queries. It is deployed at Facebook, replacing memcache for many data types that fit its model.

The system runs on thousands of machines, is widely distributed, and provides access to many petabytes of data. TAO can process a billion reads and millions of writes each second.