Database Scalability, A Challenge for Developers

According to a recent Visual Networking Index (VNI) assessment, data traffic on the Internet has been rising significantly. By 2022, it was expected that there would be more IP traffic traversing international networks than in the past 32 years.

“These developments are generating an explosion of data and a cascading pace of network expansion, which is orders of magnitude more than the impact of any one technology advancement. Although network expansion has been rapid, we haven’t yet seen it all” Director of Offering Management, Integrated Modular Solutions at Vertiv, Matt Weil, warned.

Today’s rising data volume and information variety necessitate adaptable solutions that enable databases to grow as business requirements alter.

Database Scalability: What is It?

The capacity of databases to increase their availability and behavior when the needs of the business increase is known as database scalability.

This scalability can be addressed from two approaches: Vertical and Horizontal.

Vertical: This strategy entails increasing the underlying server that houses the database’s physical and virtual resources. Add extra power, memory, or storage to your system.

Horizontal: To meet the increasing demand, this strategy entails adding extra instances or nodes to the database. Therefore, to increase the cluster’s capacity whenever an organization wants it, just add additional servers.

Why Database Scalability is Important?

A sudden spike in traffic should not be a problem for your database’s scaling capabilities. Your database should be able to shrink to conserve resources when you’re not operating at peak efficiency.

Solutions for Database Scalability

The DZone blog and community for software developers inform us that databases are essential to the applications used by organizations. This, and they cannot tolerate being overloaded. As a result, the major issues for developers are described as being database and server scalability. For this reason, they offer four remedies.

Caching Database Queries

One of the simplest methods to increase the database handling capacity is to cache database queries. The majority of the questions submitted consist of numerous queries that could be saved and read from the cache in the future. As a result, there is no longer a need to fetch data from the database each time one of these typical requests is made. The user quickly gets the information they need.

Database Indexes

Data is structured through indexing the database, which speeds up data retrieval from the database table.

Data Replication

To handle peak loads, this method makes identical copies of the database. To put it another way, as data is replicated, queries can be spread across several databases, which will lessen the load on a single database.

Fragmentation

Having a poorly designed database is one of the main problems to be solved. To prevent this from happening, choose the right database according to the type of company and make sure it has a sharding feature. Fragmenting means dividing a single large portion of the database into smaller portions of data. Known as fragments, these can be stored in several databases. By making the overall storage capacity of the system directly proportional to the number of shards in the database and if a shard goes offline, only a portion of the overall data set is unavailable. Therefore, it will not have a major impact on the performance of the system.

We hope this article has given you a better understanding of the fundamental problems with scaling and how to fix them!

Other Recommended Articles

https://risingwave.com/blog/key-challenges-and-solutions-for-database-scalability/ 

https://3ci.tech/case_studies/navigating-the-challenges-of-legacy-code-a-success-story-in-database-scalability/