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I know this sounds like a programming question which means it should be on stackoverflow but i believe server admins worry about this more and i am not looking for just the programming answer to this question.

How do i create a database for scalability? I am in the middle of http://www.slideshare.net/vishnu/livejournals-backend-a-history-of-scaling which i cant read ATM and need to leave. But i would like to know more about creating a database that scales well. Somethings that it mentioned and occur in my mind are

  • Separate handles for reads and writes?
  • What happens when one server is busy (IO or CPU bound) and i need two servers to write to?
  • Do i create multiple database? have a clusterId on users?
  • Will it be a problem when moving users to one cluster to another?
  • Might i code this so user ABC in DB A on cluster A and DEF in DB B in cluster B have the same PRIMARY KEY?
  • When i move the above to cluster C? Does this mean i need to write much code to move them to another cluster/database?
  • To make the above not an issue would i NOT use PRIMARY KEY and set the ID by hand by reading the other DBs on other clusters?

etc

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I'm curious to know if the answer(s) would vary based on RDBMS chosen – warren Nov 29 '09 at 13:59
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I believe what you might be looking for is called database sharding. I don't know anything about it as we have been able to keep WAY ahead of demand just through hardware updates.

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Sharding was the first thing that came to mind for me as well. – petertonoli Jan 1 '10 at 1:10
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