The Right Book for the Job (databases, deeply)

The track has been saying “the register”, “the ledger”, “the DB” as though there were one thing on the shelf. There is more than one kind of book, and the differences are not decoration. This is the story of how the shelf got that way, and how you pick off it.

Before you start. You need one idea from earlier in this track: a system keeps its facts somewhere and reads them back later, which is the ledger The copy clerks (database replication) copied and Splitting the ledger (sharding) cut into pieces. That is all. No SQL, no maths, no experience with any database.

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Lab

Fourteen real queries, six datastores. Which one answers yours without a second system?

Pick A wall of numbered boxes, press Add next question fourteen times, and watch Where the fourteen went fill elsewhere.

Open The right book for the job →

Ten vadas left and a crowd reaching at once. How does the stall sell exactly ten, and what does making sure cost?

Drag Buyers reaching for each vada to 12, switch between Hold the tray and Check the count again, and watch Time to an answer.

Open The last vada →