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An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard Tue, 07/31/2007 - 18:13 — Todd Hoff Once upon a time we scaled databases by buying ever bigger, faster, and more expensive machines. While this arrangement is great for big iron profit margins, it doesn't work so well for the bank accounts of our heroic system builders who need to scale well past what they can afford to spend on giant database servers. In a extraordinary two article series, Dathan Pattishall, explains his motivation for a revolutionary new database architecture--sharding--that he began thinking about even before he worked at Friendster, and fully implemented at Flickr. Flickr now handles more than 1 billion transactions per day, responding in less then a few seconds and can scale linearly at a low cost. What is sharding and how has it come to be the answer

Digg Architecture Tue, 08/07/2007 - 01:28 — Todd Hoff Traffic generated by Digg's over 1.2 million famously info-hungry users can crash an unsuspecting website head-on into its CPU, memory, and bandwidth limits. How does

eBay Architecture Tue, 07/10/2007 - 15:40 — Todd Hoff Who hasn't wondered how eBay does their business? As one of the largest most loaded websites in the world, it can't be easy. And the subtitle of the presentation hints at how creating such a monster system requires true engineering: Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance, and cost. You may not be able to emulate how eBay scales their system, but the issues and possible solutions are worth learning