Answer by Adrian J. Moreno for Facebook database design?

Take a look at these articles describing how LinkedIn and Digg are built:

• http://hurvitz.org/blog/2008/06/linkedin-architecture
• http://highscalability.com/scaling-digg-and-other-web-applications

There's also "Big Data: Viewpoints from the Facebook Data Team" that might be helpful:

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2008/01/nextyahoonet_big_data_viewpoints_from_the_fac.html

Also, there's this article that talks about non-relational databases and how they're used by some companies:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_the_relational_database_doomed.php

You'll see that these companies are dealing with data warehouses, partitioned databases, data caching and other higher level concepts than most of us never deal with on a daily basis. Or at least, maybe we don't know that we do.

There are a lot of links on the first two articles that should give you some more insight.

UPDATE 10/20/2014

Murat Demirbas wrote a summary on

• TAO: Facebook's distributed data store for the social graph (ATC'13)
• F4: Facebook's warm BLOB storage system (OSDI'14)

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/10/facebooks-software-architecture.html

HTH