Database Scalability

Abstract

Once you have designed your database, especially when supporting a web- or cloud-based solution, you need to be sure that it can grow if the business that the application supports is successful. Scalability is about ensuring that you can cope with many concurrent users, or huge amounts of data, or both. This is becoming ever more important in the era of Big Data. This chapter is in two main parts. We first examine strategies for coping with increases in the number of users of a system, and then look at the alternative approaches to handling the growth of data being stored and queried. As always there are balances to be found. Some scalability solutions can cause performance issues, and can be quite expensive, for example. We look at the difference between standalone, client/server, and distributed approaches to scalability, and explore the design constraints that each approach imposes upon database professionals. We also review the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling, and the Shared Nothing or Shared Everything approaches.