TAO: The power of the graph

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Introduced TAO (The Associations and Objects), a graph-based data storage system designed to handle Facebook's demanding social graph workload. TAO provides a unified API for managing objects (nodes) and associations (edges), abstracting away the complexities of distributed caching (Memcache) and persistent storage (MySQL). It addresses limitations of client-side graph APIs by implementing a distributed service for efficient cache management, consistency, and reduced network overhead. TAO partitions data into shards, uses a two-tier caching system (leaders and followers), and optimizes for creation-time locality.