Digg dups MySQL in favor of with Cassandra RDBMS

In past six months, digg rolled out a new client and server architecture, move away from LAMP, and abandoned MySQL in favor of “Cassandra.” Cassandra is a distributed database with a BigTable data model running on a Dynamo like infrastructure. It’s column-oriented and allows for the storage of relatively structured data. It has a fully decentralized model; every node is identical and there’s no single point of failure. It's also extremely fault tolerant; data is replicated to multiple nodes and across data centers. Cassandra is also very elastic; read and write throughput increase linearly as new machines are added. We experimented on our live site, replacing a relatively high scale MySQL component with a Cassandra alernative. These tests went well,” noted Digg.