Scaling relational SQL databases
Many applications today still rely on traditional SQL databases like MySQL, MariaDb or PostgreSQL for data storage and data processing. With the growing amount of data and new workloads that are made with this database systems, we often find ourselves in situations where we need to think about scaling such systems.
Newer versions of MySQL, PostgreSQL and other traditional SQL databases typically come with performance improvements. Even if the newer database system is not faster as a direct replacement, there might be new features available that we can take advantage of. Keeping our database system up to date expands our options on what we can do with our data and gives us the best out of the box performance. It is a basic enabler for scaling.
The most intuitive idea of scaling is to use better hardware to scale vertically (on one database server). When it comes to hardware we typically look at CPUs, disk and RAM:
