At a high level, both scalability and elasticity help to improve availability and performance when demand is changing, especially when changes are unpredictable. If the data is not available, applications cannot run. If applications cannot run or run slowly, the company loses business. Therefore, it is important to be able to ensure that databases are kept online and operational.

Database Management Systems are at the heart of most applications and, as such, the ability to scale database systems elastically is important. This series of blog posts will examine the various methods used to accomplish database availability and elasticity, as well as introduce a new architectural option for database scaling.

As cloud and container-based environments become ubiquitous, organizations are increasingly moving away from high-performance static hardware to dynamically changing, virtual, commodity infrastructure. Systems need to expand and contract easily to meet an ever-changing demand – and that includes the database.

Database scaling is often implemented by clustering. Here’s a quick overview of the pros and cons of traditional architectural implementations:

NuoDB is proud to announce we’re sponsoring the next Boston C++ Meetup!

Join us for an open discussion about trends, techniques, and technologies related to the C and C++ languages and industry. This group is open to anyone and everyone. Meet other C and C++ enthusiasts, learn something new and share your knowledge and experience.

NuoDB has hosted both the Boston C++ Meetup and the C/C++ Dublin User Group since the inception of both.