Question

Good day guys,

After browsing a bit in my spare time at work, I stumbled upon the Facebook statistics page.

“More than 30 billions pieces of
content … shared each month.”

We can assume there are probably around let’s say 20ish billions posts a month. For now, I
believe MySQL will have no problem dealing with such amount of informations since the maximum
value of an unsigned BIGINT is 18 446 744 073 709 551 615. I assume they use numeric PK for
optimisation purpose.

The question that boggle my mind is that in C++, the maximum unsigned long integer value is
4 294 967 295. How are they dealing with their database’s primary keys when their’s values
are now probably too large to be dealt with, in their back-end codes ?

Thank you

Answer 1

What about unsigned long long which is 64-bit long, exactly as BIGINT? 🙂
Also, I believe that Facebook do not use numeric ids for their DB, because it is very hard to do that at multiserver database configuration with parallel inserts.