Yea.. "auto increment" in mysql. it SUCKED in so many ways, primary of which was that it required a single mysql database to be the primary for all tweet writes

Yea.. "auto increment" in mysql. it SUCKED in so many ways, primary of which was that it required a single mysql database to be the primary for all tweet writes. Every tweet just incremented a counter by 1. As we scaled up that server got overloaded rapidly and became a huge single point of failure. Snowflake was introduced to solve several problems at once. =)