Twitter open sources its MySQL work

Twitter has decided to open source its MySQL contributions.

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For you layfolks out there, MySQL is a big part of what makes Twitter go. It’s how Twitter’s data is stored. And it’s also open-source technology. Twitter uses it heavily, and now the company’s engineers are giving back by releasing the work they’ve put into MySQL back into the open-source wild.

For you non-layfolks out there, you can dive as deep as you please on the Twitter/MySQL GitHub page and in the documentation.

“MySQL is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves,” write Twitter devs 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 work the team is releasing today revolves around five key elements: 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.

Twitter engineers also have plans to explain more about their open-source MySQL work soon; at an upcoming conference, Cole will be talking about Gizzard, the cleverly named MySQL framework Twitter devs built and open-sourced just about two years ago.

“We look forward sharing our work with upstream and other downstream MySQL vendors, with a goal to improve the MySQL community,” the dev team concludes.