Can someone give me a quick rundown on the old and latest research on scaling databases or storage? I have heard of master/slave. What else are there? Thanks!
+1
A:
In general there are two ways to scale a database - horizontal and vertical (which, if the design of your software and database are right, may be mixed together).
Vertical pretty much means bigger computers - more ram, CPU, faster disks etc...
Horizontal means spreading the load across many computers. One example is sharding, another is use of different machines for different data (one data base for customer data, another for product data etc...).
I am not sure what you mean about master/slave? It is a concept that has more to do with backup and failover than scalability.
Oded
2010-10-28 08:09:27