Database Scaling Tutorial - System Design Basics

Part 3 of series on System Design

Databases are generally the bottleneck to application performance. While app servers can be scaled horizontally with ease, all those servers will still be hitting the same database, which will eventually kill performance. In this tutorial I'll cover some of the key concepts of database design and database scaling

While you don't need to be a database expert, it is good to understand some of the fundamental concepts related to how they work in large scale web applications

Concepts covered:

• Indexes
• Denormalization
• Caching
• Replication
• Sharding / Horizontal Partitioning
• Vertical partitioning
• Tradeoffs of the above strategies