Application Performance Optimization – Replication
I have been talking about Sharding as a technique for improving application performance. Sharding distributes your data across multiple servers with the intention to allow multiple server to server requests for data.
Replication is another technique that is a close cousin to sharding. Replication is a term that is well understood for Relational database engineers. There are many forms of replication allowing data to be copied from one database to another. Depending on the kind of replication the copies may be used to increase performance and/or provide failover during disasters.
As I continue my reading in “The Definitive Guid to MongoDB” by Apress I am finding NoSQL has also taken some of the performance and failover capabilities of Replication very seriously.
When addressing the performance concerns of Scalability the book states:
For web applications in particular, scalability is a critical design requirement, especially those that rely heavily on backend databases. Replication can help you create more scalable applications in two ways:
• Improve performance: Replication can help you improve an application’s raw performance. This is particularly true for cases where you have a large web application with a predominantly read-based dataset, and you want to distribute queries to multiple database servers to increase parallelism.
• Improve redundancy: Replication can help you improve redundancy by enabling you to host an application in several data centers. In this approach, you ensure that there is a local copy of the data in each data center, so that the application can have high-speed access to it. Users can then be connected to the data center that is closest to them, minimizing latency.
How do you see replication technologies fitting into your business needs? Are you finding replication difficult to understand, configure or maintain? Do you find NoSQL replication such as MongoDB is mature enough for your enterprise?
Drop me a note with your thoughts at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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