Scaling Relational Databases
Replication, partitioning and sharding without downtime
By Omar El Alaoui
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About the book
What you’re getting into
The relational database you started with can take you much further than people assume — if you scale it on purpose. This book walks through the moves that matter: read replicas, connection pooling, partitioning big tables, and eventually sharding, each with its trade-offs on the table. You'll learn to add capacity while keeping the data correct and the migrations boring.
After you’ve read it
What you’ll be able to do
- Know when to scale up before you scale out
- Tame connection counts with pooling and poolers
- Add read replicas and route reads without serving stale data
- Partition large tables for pruning and cheap archival
- Choose a shard key you won't regret
- Run expand-and-contract migrations with zero downtime
- Cache safely without serving lies
- Plan capacity, failover and backups for scale
Table of contents
- 01
Scaling the Database You Have
- Vertical headroom first
- Where relational actually breaks
- A scaling roadmap
- 02
Connection Management
- The cost of a connection
- Pooling and external poolers
- Capping concurrency
- 03
Read Replicas and Replication
- Streaming replication basics
- Replica lag and staleness
- Routing reads safely
- 04
Partitioning Large Tables
- Range, list and hash partitioning
- Partition pruning and maintenance
- Archiving cold data
- 05
Sharding When You Must
- Choosing a shard key
- Routing and rebalancing
- Cross-shard queries
- 06
Zero-Downtime Migrations
- Expand-and-contract
- Backfilling safely
- Online schema changes
- 07
Caching Without Lying
- What to cache and where
- Invalidation strategies
- Surviving cache stampedes
- 08
Operating at Scale
- Capacity planning
- Failover and backups
- A resilience checklist
The full chapter list, exactly as it appears in your PDF.
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