FlockDB

FlockDB is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 distributed, fault-tolerant graph database

Graph database

A graph database uses graph structures with nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data. By definition, a graph database is any storage system that provides index-free adjacency. General graph databases that can store any graph are distinct from specialized graph databases such as...

 for managing data at webscale. It was initially used by Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 to build its database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

 of users and manage their relationships to one another. The developers claim that it is much simpler than other graph databases since it scales horizontally and is designed for on-line, low-latency, high throughput environments such as websites. Since it is still in the process of being packaged for outside of Twitter use, the code is still very rough and hence there is no stable release available yet. FlockDB was posted on GitHub

Github

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects...

 shortly after Twitter released its Gizzard framework, which it uses to query

Information retrieval

Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

 the FlockDB distributed datastore. The database is licensed under the Apache License

Apache License

The Apache License is a copyfree free software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation . The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer....

.