Ok, but Does It Scale?
This article explores the technical challenges of scaling database systems, specifically focusing on the difference between vertical and horizontal scalability. It introduces 'Spacetime' as a solution for high-performance, parallelizable OLTP workloads.
Why it matters
Understanding database scalability is critical for engineers building modern, high-traffic applications that must handle massive data growth.
This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer.
Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is in the details, as it so often is. On the other hand, it’s also not so complex that we can’t understand scalability from first principles in a blog post.
Let’s start by exploring scalability in general, and then let’s answer the question, “How does Spacetime scale?”
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