Database Performance at Scale: A Practical Guide

by Felipe Cardeneti Mendes, Pavel Emelyanov, Felipe Cardeneti Mendes

Discover critical considerations and best practices for improving database performance based on what has worked, and failed, across thousands of teams and use cases in the field. This open access book provides practical guidance for understanding the database-related opportunities, trade-offs, and traps you might encounter while trying to optimize data-intensive applications for high throughput and low latency. Whether you are building a new system from the ground up or trying to optimize an existing use case for increased demand, this book covers the essentials. The book begins with a look at the many factors impacting database performance at the extreme scale that today’s game changing applications face―or at least hope to achieve. You’ll gain insight into the performance impact of both technical and business requirements, and how those should influence your decisions around database infrastructure and topology. The authors share an inside perspective on often-overlooked engineering details that could be constraining―or helping―your team’s database performance. The book also covers benchmarking and monitoring practices by which to measure and validate the outcomes from the decisions that you make. The ultimate goal of the book is to help you discover new ways to optimize database performance for your team’s specific use cases, requirements, and expectations. What You Will Learn
Who This Book Is For Individuals and teams looking to optimize distributed database performance for an existing project or to begin a new performance-sensitive project with a solid and scalable foundation. This will likely include software architects, database architects, and senior software engineers who are either experiencing or anticipating pain related to database latency and/or throughput.

Genres: Technology

278 pages, Paperback

Published September 8, 2023

Reviews

[Szymon Kulec · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 out of 5, I really like it.

In its preface it clears out expectations so that you won't find it crazy bit magic and concurrent algorithms. So what can you find? The book introduces you into the world of highly scalable databases with all the caveats of measuring, planning, designing their usage and deployments. And it does in a really good way, sprinkling nice humor here and there and showing how a well managed scalable db will behave if you treat it right. I was a bit afraid that as it comes from ScyllaDb team, it will be only about Scylla, but it's not. It's much broader and gives you good insight on how modern databases can provide you, your team/company and your project, with what's needed.

The only disadvantage is that ending is much more flat than the rest of the book. Still, it's a good position to add to Designing Data-Intensive Applications and Database Internals: A deep-dive into how distributed data systems work

[Andreea Olaru · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall a very good book, lots of great insights on database performance, quite low level at times, but as good as DDIA and i liked it better than Database Internals.

Too generalistic at times "write heavy databases write the data in memory before persisting it on disk" really? All?

A little potential mistake in chapter 2 when discussing use cases for autoscaling: "load peak is narrow relative to the baseline" , this would imply a quick load spike that would not last, hence the autoscaling would be useless, even the authors said a few lines prior that autoscaling is best used for loads that last

Lots of good references (articles and youtube videos)

[Lucille Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book that goes through the practical issues of latency and concurrence in databases, especially in distributed systems. I was skeptical given that the writers are all from ScyllaDB but there was actually a fairly balanced view of the positives and negatives of each DB application. Some writing could be clearer and more direct, but overall, a very good practitioner's read on the topic.

[Daniel]

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[Vladislav Ladenkov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally agree with @Szymon Kulec