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Dubious Database Design
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Andrew Godwin
September 07, 2015
Programming
0
270
Dubious Database Design
My talk from DjangoCon US 2015.
Andrew Godwin
September 07, 2015
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Transcript
DUBIOUS Database DESIGN
Andrew Godwin Hi, I'm Author of 1.7 Django & South
migrations Senior Software Engineer at Only hates MySQL a little
“Do this. Don't ask why.”
Learning from failure.
Spacelog 1
Spacelog 1
“Redis is fast!”
None
Spacelog 1
Read-only, forever.
“Redis is fast!”
GET chapter-1 GET chapter-2
GET entry-123 GET entry-124 GET entry-125
ZRANGEBYSCORE .... GET entry-123 GET entry-124 GET entry-125
Request page Look up key range Multi-get key range Get
speaker details
SELECT ... JOIN ... WHERE ...
Ignoring JOIN 2
“Joins are slow!”
{"id": 11, "post": "abc", "author": 1} {"id": 12, "post": "def",
"author": 2} {"id": 13, "post", "ghi", "author": 3} {"id": 1, "name": "Andrew"} {"id": 2, "name": "Brenda"} {"id": 3, "name": "Carol"}
n number of authors m × number of posts
scan all posts build dict of author -> posts scan
all authors and emit with posts
HASH JOIN
{ "id": 11, "post":"abc", "author": {"name": "Andrew"} }
{ "id": 11, "post":"abc", "author": { "name": "Andrew", "last_seen": 120993013,
} }
The server's running, it's fine! 3
Write new save file Write new save file Delete old
save file
Write new save file Write new save file ?
Tell payment processor to send Mark as processing Find unpaid
clients Mark as paid
Tell payment processor to send Mark as processing Find unpaid
clients Mark as paid
The Fastidious Modeller 4
TwitterUser FacebookUser LinkedInUser EmailUser
SELECT ... FROM TwitterUser SELECT ... FROM EmailUser SELECT ...
FROM LinkedInUser
None
None
The database isn't magic.
The Table Lover 5
“How do I make tables at runtime?”
None
Tables/columns per language Tables/columns per customer Configurable CMS columns
Columns per language 300 - 400 language variants x A
couple of translated cols per table x
DDL is very expensive.
Use JSON, hstore, or EAV-style table!
6 The Cold Boot
Decent cache hit rate Application servers mostly utilised
Great engineering!
What would happen if I deleted the entire cache?
None
The Optimist 7
Sharded PostgreSQL ElasticSearch Riak Redis Flat files + + +
+
Don't forget redundancy. And backups.
What happens if just one dies?
n services = n points of failure
The Primary Optimist 8
“The highest value PK is the most recent”
“Autoincrement will work and scale forever”
“IDs are numbers we can do maths on”
The Function Lover 9
"Why waste time fetching columns and rendering them separately?"
CREATE FUNCTION
CREATE FUNCTION ... import jinja2
bit.ly/whynotpg
None
SELECT render(template, id) FROM pages WHERE %s ~ url;
None
There's a reason behind every rule.
Ask why, or try yourself. Don't write it off without
context.
Thanks. Andrew Godwin @andrewgodwin