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TAO

A distributed graph store built by Meta (Facebook) for serving the social graph at scale. Shards data across MySQL instances with a caching layer, later extended with the RAMP-TAO protocol for geo-distributed atomic visibility. Not available as a standalone product.

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Overall rank
#66
First released
May 2012
License
Proprietary
Built with
C++

Details

Vendor
Meta
Type
Other
Category
Established
License
Proprietary
Language
C++
Query Languages
TAO API
Protocols
Unknown

Feature scores

Community & Business

Active development
0%
No updates in 6+ months
Commercial support
0%
No commercial support
Live community
0%
No community activity data
Open Source
0%
Closed source
Pricing
0%
No pricing information
Trendiness
0%
Declining trend

Deployment

Containerization
0%
No container image
Work as dedicated instance
✓
Can run as standalone server
Work as embedded
0%
Standalone only
Testing in-memory version
0%
No in-memory option

Platform

Operating on Linux
0%
Not supported
Operating on Windows
0%
Not supported
SaaS offering
0%
Self-hosted only

Operations

Automatic updates
0%
Manual updates only
Client side caching
✓
Client-side cache available
Data versioning support
0%
No versioning
Live backups
✓
Hot backup supported

Distribution

Cluster Re-balancing
0%
No auto-rebalancing
Data Distribution
✓
Data sharding supported
High-Availability
✓
HA mechanisms available
Query Distribution
0%
No distributed queries
Replication support
✓
Replication available

Developer Experience

Data types defined
✓
Composite data types
Logging/Auditing
0%
No logging/auditing
Object-Graph Mapper
0%
No object mapper
Reactive programming
0%
No reactive programming
Documentation up-to-date
0%
No documentation
Binary protocol
0%
Text-based protocols only
CLI
0%
No CLI
GUI
0%
No GUI

Data Model

Multi-database
0%
Graph-only
Graph-native data
0%
Graph abstraction layer
REST API
✓
REST endpoint available
Query Language
0%
No query language

Transactions

Granular locking
0%
No granular locking
Multiple isolation levels
0%
Read uncommitted only
Read committed transaction
0%
Not available
Transaction support
✓
ACID transactions

Schema & Security

Constraints
0%
No constraints
Schema support
✓
Schema definition tools
Secondary indexes
✓
Secondary indexes supported
Server side procedures
✓
Stored procedures supported
Triggers
✓
Event triggers supported
Authentication
0%
No authentication
Authorization
0%
No authorization
Data encryption
0%
No encryption
Sources 5 references

Protocols Unknown

Facebook-internal and closed-source; the 2013 USENIX paper describes a custom multiplexed protocol with out-of-order responses between clients and TAO's cache tier but never names a public wire format, so the draft's specific 'Native binary (RPC)' claim goes beyond what's confirmable.

License Proprietary

TAO is an internal Facebook/Meta system, never released as source or a product; described only through papers/blog posts, with no public repository or license file.

Released 2012-05

Confirms current value with a month: development started in 2009, but TAO was first publicly disclosed in a SIGMOD industrial talk in May 2012, a year before the fuller USENIX ATC 2013 paper.

Language C++

Confirms current value; no primary Facebook/Meta source states the language outright, but a contemporaneous technical report describes the caching daemons as C/C++, and a follow-on VLDB paper's TAO-based prototype is implemented in C++.