Chapter 1 - Scale from Zero To Millions of Users

SQL Databases ( Relational )

• Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Can perform join between different tables
• suitable for most projects

Non Relational Databases

• MongoDB, DynamoDB, CouchDB
• Grouped into 4 categories: key-value stores, graph stores, column stores, and document stores
• Right choice if
  • app requires super-low latency
  • data unstructured, no relational data
  • only need to serialize and deserialize data ( XML, JSON )
  • you need to store an insane amount of data

Vertical Scaling - scale up

• means adding more power to your servers( CPU, RAM )
• good when traffic is low since it’s simple
• vertical scaling has a hard limit since you can’t just keep adding CPU and memory to a single server.
• vertical scaling does not have failover and redundancy. If one server goes down, the entire site goes down with it.