Master-slave replication
The master serves reads and writes, replicating writes to one or more slaves, which serve only reads. Slaves can also replicate to additional slaves in a tree-like fashion. If the master goes offline, the system can continue to operate in read-only mode until a slave is promoted to a master or a new master is provisioned.
Master-Master replication
Both masters serve reads and writes and coordinate with each other on writes. If either master goes down, the system can continue to operate with both reads and writes.
- You’ll need a load balancer or you’ll need to make changes to your application logic to determine where to write.
- Most master-master systems are either loosely consistent (violating ACID) or have increased write latency due to synchronization.
- Conflict resolution comes more into play as more write nodes are added and as latency increases.
- There is a potential for loss of data if the master fails before any newly written data can be replicated to other nodes.
- Writes are replayed to the read replicas. If there are a lot of writes, the read replicas can get bogged down with replaying writes and can’t do as many reads.
- The more read slaves, the more you have to replicate, which leads to greater replication lag.
- On some systems, writing to the master can spawn multiple threads to write in parallel, whereas read replicas only support writing sequentially with a single thread.
- Replication adds more hardware and additional complexity.
Federation
Federation (or functional partitioning) splits up databases by function. For example, instead of a single, monolithic database, you could have three databases: forums, users, and products, resulting in less read and write traffic to each database and therefore less replication lag. Smaller databases result in more data that can fit in memory, which in turn results in more cache hits due to improved cache locality. With no single central master serializing writes you can write in parallel, increasing throughput.
- Federation is not effective if your schema requires huge functions or tables.
- You’ll need to update your application logic to determine which database to read and write.
- Joining data from two databases is more complex with a server link.
- Federation adds more hardware and additional complexity.
Sharding
- You’ll need to update your application logic to work with shards, which could result in complex SQL queries.
- Data distribution can become lopsided in a shard. For example, a set of power users on a shard could result in increased load to that shard compared to others. Rebalancing adds additional complexity. A sharding function based on consistent hashing can reduce the amount of transferred data.
- Joining data from multiple shards is more complex.
- Sharding adds more hardware and additional complexity.
Denormalization
Denormalization attempts to improve read performance at the expense of some write performance. Redundant copies of the data are written in multiple tables to avoid expensive joins. Some RDBMS such as PostgreSQL and Oracle support materialized views which handle the work of storing redundant information and keeping redundant copies consistent. Once data becomes distributed with techniques such as federation and sharding, managing joins across data centers further increases complexity. Denormalization might circumvent the need for such complex joins. In most systems, reads can heavily outnumber writes 100:1 or even 1000:1. A read resulting in a complex database join can be very expensive, spending a significant amount of time on disk operations. Disadvantage(s): denormalization- Data is duplicated.
- Constraints can help redundant copies of information stay in sync, which increases complexity of the database design.
- A denormalized database under heavy write load might perform worse than its normalized counterpart.