Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites

8. Database Rules

In Chapter 4, “Use the Right Tools,” we discussed Maslow’s Hammer (aka the Law of the Instrument), which put simply is an overreliance, to a fault, on a familiar tool. We discussed that one common example of overuse is the relational database. Recall that relational databases typically give us certain benefits outlined by an acronym called ACID described in Table 8.1.

Table 8.1. ACID Properties of Databases

ACID properties are really powerful when we need to split up data into different entities with each entity having some number of relationships with other entities within the database. They are even more powerful when we want ...