An Approximative Study of Database Partitioning with Respect to Popular Social Networking Websites and Applications

Abstract

The users of social networking applications and websites are the prime producers of huge amounts of data that the world is witnessing today. With these growing databases, all the social networking websites and applications are looking for an easy, secure and efficient maintenance of the database. As the size of both the database and the network grow, the entire database cannot be kept in a single node/single location. So the need arises for distributing the database over a network by dividing the database into portions called partitions. The partitions may be replicated at multiple nodes depending on the needed degree of availability. At the same time a single partition may further be split across a collection of nodes depending on how much data is need at a node. In this article, we have highlighted what is database partitioning, what is its need. This article also highlights some of the popular social networking websites and applications that are using a numerous database depending on the features they are providing. During our study, we have studied upon some of the data bases used by the example websites considered and what type of partitioning scheme might have been used. This article discusses some key features of database partitioning schemes of Facebook, twitter, amazon, WhatsApp and Instagram.