UPDATED 13:34 EDT / NOVEMBER 02 2012

NEWS

Database Scaling Explained As Easy As Baking a Cake

In reading tech blogs or talking to people with in depth knowledge of the IT world, you’d often hear phrases such as “scalability is the key to…” or “scaling is important…” or “…and that’s what scaling is about.”  But the question is, what is scaling/scalability?

According to Wikipedia, scalability is “the ability of a system, network, or process, to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.”  Seems easy enough to accomplish right?  But is it really?

A question on Quora was posted regarding how hard scaling a database is, in Layman’s terms.  It got a number of interesting answers mostly analogies so people can easily understand what scaling a database is all about and why it’s not that easy.

The top answer comes from Yishan Wong with 1161 votes.

Wong compared a database to a library and scaling to expanding the library.  He simply put it this way: if you own a library, and it gets popular, you’d be face with the dilemma of accommodating many library goers and satisfying their needs whether it be the issue of having enough of the popular books, enough space to accommodate the library goers, enough space to accommodate all the books, keeping the books in check or in order so that books can easily be discovered, expanding your book collection and keeping them updated etc.  So the point is, the more people use the library, the more you have to pay attention to keeping them satisfied.

The second best answer comes from Paul King who used to work at Oracle.

He compared scaling database to keeping phonebooks updated.  Basically, what he said was you curate phone numbers in a book so people can easily get access to them, but if you only have one book, people would have to line up to get their hands on it so you could be facing a lot of angry people.  So the solution is replicating that phonebook so more people can use it at the same time.  But the problem of keeping the phonebook updated arises as a lot of people may change their phone numbers at any given time.  So the phonebook maker is faced with the ordeal of either recalling all the phonebooks and replacing them with updated phonebooks but then the consumers would have to go without the phonebooks for sometime or replace the phonebooks one at a time but face inconsistencies or they can just give the consumers another phonebook or an add-on to keep it updated.

Then there’s the answer from Rob Weir, a former Software Performance Architect, that likened scaling database to a recipe.

If you want to bake a cake, for example, you’d look for a recipe.  Let’s say the recipe call for a cup of sugar, half cup of butter, two eggs, two teaspoons of vanilla extract, one and a half cup of all-purpose flour, one and three-fourths teaspoon of baking powder and a half cup of milk.  But you have two cups of white sugar, two cups of butter, six eggs, eight teaspoons vanilla extract, eight cups all-purpose flour, eight teaspoons baking powder and cups of milks in hand.  Based on the ingredients you have, you can only make two cakes as the cup of sugar is your limiting factor, in order to bake more cakes, you need more sugar.  But even if you have more sugar, you can only make one more cake as the egg now becomes your limiting factor.  So the point is, in order for you to scale properly and correctly, you need to have all the proper requirements.

To read more about database scalability, click here


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