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King.com, a free online gaming site based in Sweden, redrew its data architecture to cope with big data coming largely from Facebook. Founded in 2003, the company claims to be the largest casual social gaming site in the world, with tournaments in categories such as puzzle, strategy, word, action, card and sports games. Its games, which include Bubble Witch Saga and Candy Crush, have attracted more than 60 million registered users playing more than five billion games per month. King.com has more than 150 games in its portfolio, all of which are free to play. It generates revenues from in-game products such as boosters and extra lives, as well as through advertising. Mats-Olov Eriksson, director of data warehousing at the company, says it had managed without big data technologies for some time, but the increased data volumes that came with games on Facebook were too much for the MySQL database it had relied on. It was okay for one million users per day, but King.com had in the order of 10 times that by the end of 2012. There was ...