Twitter’s service is nothing if not fast-moving, and on Tuesday night the company published a blog post detailing the database that helps it keep up. Called Manhattan, it’s a distributed, real-time database built to serve multiple teams and applications within the company.

It’s also something of an indictment against existing open source database technologies, at least when it comes to handling the scale and, probably more accurately, the speed of Twitter. The blog post was authored by Twitter software engineer Peter Schuller, who wrote:

“We were spending far too much time firefighting production systems to meet the performance expectations of our various products, and standing up new storage capacity for a use case involved too much manual work and process. Our experience developing and operating production storage at Twitter’s scale made it clear that the situation was simply not sustainable.”

Schuller goes into a fair amount of detail into how…