Twitter?s Snowflake Project To Update Tweet IDs Really Is More Like A Blizzard Now

Last week, we noted that Twitter was on the verge of executing their long-in-the-making Snowflake project. Basically, this was a necessary step to switch up the way tweet IDs are handled due of Twitter's move from MySQL to Cassandra for their database infrastructure. Twitter clearly realized that the switch-over might be a little bumpy, and that's why they started alerting third-party developers about it months ago. But it turns out it's even more bumpy than they realized. And that's why the transition hasn't happened yet. And won't for a while. A post today by developer advocate Matt Harris in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group outlines what is going on. It's a bit technical, and if you're a developer, you should obviously read the whole thing. It boils down to this: some programming languages, notably JavaScript, cannot support numbers with more than 53 bits. That's a problem since Snowflake is going to create tweet IDs that are 64 bit unsigned integers.

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