Digg apparently has started using Cassandra (a structured key-value store) as an alternative to MySQL for some of their features. MySQL is pretty much the standard for a wide range of large SNS (including Facebook, Flickr, and Digg itself). As someone who’s done his fair-share of work scaling, federating, sharding, and doing other -ings to databases to speed up and optimize large amounts of data for web applications, it’s interesting to see where this experiment leads to.

note: Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook, released as open source in ‘08, and is now an apache incubator project. Don’t you just love the web?