TAO: How Facebook Serves the Social Graph
Summary: TAO stores Facebook’s social graph as typed nodes (fbobjects) and typed edges (associations). A simple API exposes queries over same-typed associations leaving an object; TAO is a distributed graph store that has served production traffic at Facebook for more than 2 years. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Venkat Venkataramani (Meta)
- 2. Zach Amsden (Meta)
- 3. Nathan Bronson (Meta)
- 4. George Cabrera (Meta)
- 5. Prasad Chakka (Meta)
- 6. Peter Dimov (Meta)
- 7. Hui Ding (Meta)
- 8. Jack Ferris (Meta)
- 9. Anthony Giardullo (Meta)
- 10. Jeremy Hoon (Meta)
- 11. Sachin Kulkarni (Meta)
- 12. Nathan Lawrence (Meta)
- 13. Mark Marchukov (Meta)
- 14. Dmitri Petrov (Meta)
- 15. Lovro Puzar (Meta)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{venkataramani_sigmod12,
title = {{TAO: How Facebook Serves the Social Graph}},
author = {Venkataramani, Venkat and Amsden, Zach and Bronson, Nathan and Cabrera, George and Chakka, Prasad and Dimov, Peter and Ding, Hui and Ferris, Jack and Giardullo, Anthony and Hoon, Jeremy and Kulkarni, Sachin and Lawrence, Nathan and Marchukov, Mark and Petrov, Dmitri and Puzar, Lovro},
series = {{SIGMOD} '12},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/2213836.2213957},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2213836.2213957},
year = {2012}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,213 | MyRocks: LSM-Tree Database Storage Engine Serving Facebook's Social Graph | 2020 | VLDB | 0.00011646797 |
| 3,499 | Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph | 2013 | VLDB | 7.362886e-05 |
| 3,666 | Harmonia: Near-Linear Scalability for Replicated Storage with In-Network Conflict Detection | 2020 | VLDB | 7.2142119e-05 |
| 5,878 | Distributed Graph Simulation: Impossibility and Possibility | 2014 | VLDB | 6.0539311e-05 |
| 6,791 | MILC: Inverted List Compression in Memory | 2017 | VLDB | 5.7723936e-05 |
| 7,734 | Using VDMS to Index and Search 100M Images | 2021 | VLDB | 5.5563709e-05 |
| 8,239 | In-Network Leaderless Replication for Distributed Data Stores | 2022 | VLDB | 5.4595803e-05 |
| 10,996 | Scribe: How Meta transports terabytes per second in real time | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|
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Semantically Similar Papers
| # | Overall Rank | Paper | Year | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1,635 | SCADS: Scale-Independent Storage for Social Computing Applications | 2009 | CIDR |
| 2 | 4,701 | Nanosecond Indexing of Graph Data With Hash Maps and VLists | 2019 | SIGMOD |
| 3 | 2,985 | Piggybacking on Social Networks | 2013 | VLDB |
| 4 | 8,017 | Data Management for Social Networking | 2016 | PODS |
| 5 | 2,191 | Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure at Facebook | 2010 | SIGMOD |
| 6 | 389 | One Trillion Edges: Graph Processing at Facebook-Scale | 2015 | VLDB |
| 7 | 10,698 | RedTAO: A Trillion-edge High-throughput Graph Store | 2025 | SIGMOD |
| 8 | 5,262 | RAMP-TAO: Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook's Online TAO Data Store | 2021 | VLDB |
| 9 | 6,676 | Petabyte Scale Databases and Storage Systems at Facebook | 2013 | SIGMOD |
| 10 | 4,996 | TAOBench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Social Network Workloads | 2022 | VLDB |