Scribd
Upload
20 views11 pages

6th Choosing Your Database

The document discusses factors to consider when choosing a database for a microservice including query patterns, consistency requirements, storage capacity needs, performance needs, maturity and stability of options, and cost of different solutions.

Uploaded by

bhosaletejas43
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
20 views11 pages

6th Choosing Your Database

The document discusses factors to consider when choosing a database for a microservice including query patterns, consistency requirements, storage capacity needs, performance needs, maturity and stability of options, and cost of different solutions.

Uploaded by

bhosaletejas43
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 11

Choosing your database

By Komal Konkati
How to choose the right database for your service
Choosing which database to use is one of the most
important decisions you can make when working on a
new microservice.
• While there is a convergence happening in some general-
purpose databases (that support various models relational /
document / key-value at the same time) like MySQL and
PostgreSQL, which claim to make your life easier,

• Cloud providers like Amazon offer a dazzling array of


database and storage options (e.g. Amazon has Aurora, RDS,
DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Keyspaces, elastiCache, S3, elastic
file system, etc…), making it harder to figure out which one is
the right one.
Query Patterns

How you are going to fetch your data is one of the main ways
to find the best database for your use case. If you are going to
fetch data by key, then all you need is a key-value store (e.g.
DynamoDB, Redis, S3, GCS).

In case you mostly fetch via key, but sometimes you also need
to fetch by one or two other fields, then Wide-Column DBs
(e.g.DynamoDB, Cassandra) may be right for you.
On the other hand if you will require to query by many
different fields you can choose either Relational DB
(e.g.MySQL, PostgreSQL) or Document DB (e.g.MongoDB,
CouchDB, MySQL, PostgreSQ). Note that Document DBs
don’t support well queries that require joining data from
multiple documents.
Consistency

In case you need to read your data right after your write it (i.e.
strong consistency) than a Relational database (e.g. MySQL,
PostgreSQL) is usually more suited than a Document Database
(e.g.MongoDB, CouchDB), especially in case of multi-data-center
scenario.
• Storage Capacity
Most database systems are limited by the amount of
space on disk (e.g. MySQL) or struggle with performance
as amount of Nodes and Shards grows into the hundreds
(e.g. Elasticsearch).

When infinite storage is needed this is where cloud


solutions shine. Object Storage Services like S3 and GCS
will allow you to store as much data as you like with the
handy option is multiple tiers, so you pay less for data
that is rarely retrieved.
• Performance
All databases performance degrades as the amount of
read/write throughput traffic increases. This is the time when
optimizations such as re-indexing and re-sharding of your data
come in handy.

In case you have very high traffic and require very low latency,
Cloud providers solutions like Amazon’s DynamoDB and
Google’s Bigtable could be just what you need. As long as your
service is deployed on the same data center as the database,
you can enjoy latencies that are under 10ms. The downside is
of-course the $ cost.
Maturity and Stability

Choosing the most trendy, powerful, and fully featured


database to self-host maybe tempting, but as long as your
orgainization doesn’t have experience with this database, you
may end up regretting it.

Setup, configuration and fine tuning of databases is a lengthy


and risky ordeal. Sometimes choosing the “old” organization
self-hosted work-horse will pay bigger dividends in the long
term when it comes to production stability.
Cost

The payment model for managed cloud solutions is usually


proportional to the read/write traffic. Make sure to read the
finer print for each managed solution and make sure that it is
cost-effective for your specific read/write usage patterns.

You might also like