Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 28, 2026

FlockDB

FlockDB was an open-source distributed, fault-tolerant graph database for managing wide but shallow network graphs. It was initially used by Twitter to store relationships between users, e.g. followings and favorites. FlockDB differs from other graph databases, e.g. Neo4j in that it was not designed for multi-hop graph traversal but rather for rapid set operations, not unlike the primary use-case for Redis sets. FlockDB was posted on GitHub shortly after Twitter released its Gizzard framework, which it used to query the FlockDB distributed datastore. The database is licensed under the Apache License.

Last revised
May 28, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
206 w
Citations
6
Source
Wikipedia ↗
FlockDB
Original authorsNick Kallen, Robey Pointer, John Kalucki and Ed Ceaser from Twitter
DeveloperTwitter1
Initial releaseApril 2010 (2010-04)
Final release
1.8.5 / 23 February 2012 (2012-02-23)2
Written inScala, Java, Ruby
TypeGraph Database
LicenseApache License 2.0
Websitegithub.com/twitter/flockdb
Repository

FlockDB was an open-source distributed, fault-tolerant graph database for managing wide but shallow network graphs.3 It was initially used by Twitter to store relationships between users, e.g. followings and favorites. FlockDB differs from other graph databases, e.g. Neo4j in that it was not designed for multi-hop graph traversal but rather for rapid set operations, not unlike the primary use-case for Redis sets.4 FlockDB was posted on GitHub shortly after Twitter released its Gizzard framework, which it used to query the FlockDB distributed datastore. The database is licensed under the Apache License.1

Twitter no longer supports FlockDB.5

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "FlockDB System Properties". db-engines.com. Retrieved 2017-10-09.
  2. "FlockDB 1.8.5 released". Twitter. February 22, 2012. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  3. "Gigaom". gigaom.com. Archived from the original on 17 September 2017. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
  4. "GitHub - twitter-archive/flockdb: A distributed, fault-tolerant graph database". github.com. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
  5. "GitHub - twitter-archive/flockdb: A distributed, fault-tolerant graph database". github.com. Retrieved 27 May 2020. Twitter is no longer maintaining this project or responding to issues or PRs.
External links