As your applications scale, you’ll likely find that your database is one of the major bottlenecks. There are a variety of options available for scaling a database server; one is master-slave replication, and another (but often trickier) is master-master replication. MariaDB, an open-source fork of MySQL, supports an add-on package known as MariaDB Galera Cluster, which offers a variety of replication options, including multi-master replication. How does it work? How do you configure it? And does this option apply to your needs? This talk, by Nirbhay Choubey, should provide you with most of the answers that you need.
Craigslist is one of the best-known, and most popular, Web sites, allowing people to find household items, find apartments, and jobs (among other things). How does Craiglist’s back end work? How is it able to provide such fast and responsive search results? In this talk, Jeremy Zawodny describes how Craigslist has evolved over time, and how this evolution has allowed them to improve their search responsiveness. If you’re interested in how to scale Web applications, then Craigslist is a great example, and their technology choices are useful to learn about, too.
Databases are a major factor in modern applications. There are at least two major axes along which you have to decide when choosing a database: SQL vs. NoSQL, and open source vs. proprietary. What considerations should you keep in mind when choosing? Baron Schwartz, who has long been active in the MySQL community and is the author of numerous blog posts and a book about MySQL performance tuning, gave this talk at Google in February 2014, in which he discussed the considerations that go into database choices. Even if you prefer a different database, it’s useful and interesting to hear the considerations that a MySQL veteran brings to the table, and how he sees the current state of the database world.
MySQL and PostgreSQL are both well-known open-source relational databases. What happens if you want to move your application from MySQL to PostgreSQL? Data migrations are always difficult; if you have a great deal of data, or you have used many of MySQL’s built-in functionality, then you may encounter problems. In this talk, Dimitri Fontaine describes a real-life example of migrating a very large data set from MySQL to PostgreSQL. What was easy, and what was hard? What does he recommend to others interested in doing so?
MySQL is the most popular open-source database. As an open-source project, it can be forked and distributed under a new name. MariaDB is not just a fork of MySQL, but an open-source project led my Monty Widenius, the original author of MySQL. MariaDB thus promises a large degree of MySQL compatibility, while also improving on it in many important ways.
In this talk from 2012, Max Mether introduces MariaDB, comparing it with MySQL and indicating how its many improvements make it a strong candidate to replace MySQL, now and in the future.