Small Data: Databases in the Real World

A talk I gave at PyCon AU 2014.

1. Andrew Godwin @andrewgodwin SMALL DATA REAL WORLD DATABASES IN THE
2. Andrew Godwin Core Developer Senior Engineer
3. BIG DATA What does it mean? What is 'big'?
4. 1,000 rows? 1,000,000 rows? 1,000,000,000 rows? 1,000,000,000,000 rows?
5. Scalable designs are a tradeoff: NOW LATER vs
6. Small company? Agency? Focus on ease of change, not scalability
7. You don't need to scale from day one But always leave yourself scaling points
8. Rapid development Continuous deployment Hardware choice Scaling 'breakpoints'
9. Rapid development It's all about schema change overhead
10. Explicit Schema ID int Name text Weight uint 1 2 3 Alice Bob Charles 76 84 65 Implicit Schema { "id": 342, "name": "David", "weight": 44, }
11. Silent Failure { "id": 342, "name": "David", "weight": 74, } { "id": 342, "name": "Ellie", "weight": "85kg", } { "id": 342, "nom": "Frankie", "weight": 77, } { "id": 342, "name": "Frankie", "weight": -67, }
12. Continuous deployment It's 11pm. Do you know where your locks are?
13. Add NULL and backfill 1-to-1 relation and backfill DBMS-supported type changes
14. Hardware choice ZOMG RUN IT ON THE CLOUD
15. VMs are TERRIBLE at IO Up to 10x slowdown, even with VT-d.
16. Memory is king Your database loves it. Don't let other apps steal it.
17. Adding more power goes far Especially with PostgreSQL or read-only replicas
19. Sharding point Vertical split Consistency leeway
20. Sharding point Datasets paritioned by primary key
21. Migration plan Implement consistent hashing on primary key Make large number of logical shards (2048?) Map logical shards to single physical shard Migrate shards using replication
22. Vertical split Entirely unrelated tables
23. Migration plan Replicate database to new server Route split tables there, disable replication - or - Slowly backfill new datastore with fallback lookup
24. Denormalisation It's not free!
25. Migration plan Add NULL fields to dependent tables App code to fetch and fill if not present Possibly prefill on save of new items
26. Consistency leeway Can you take inconsistent views?
27. Migration plan Change your site! Talk to your designers! Deliberately introduce inconsistency!
28. Big Data isn't one thing It depends on type, size, complexity, throughput, latency...
29. Focus on the current problems Future problems don't matter if you never get there
30. Efficiency and iterating fast matters The smaller you are, the more time is worth
31. Good architecture affects product You're not writing a system in a vacuum
32. Thanks! Andrew Godwin @andrewgodwin andrewgodwin@eventbrite.com are hiring!