Welcome to this course on database scalability! My name is Ben Dicken, and I'll be your host throughout this video series. In this course, you'll learn many methods for scaling your database — from partitioning, replication, sharding, caching, connection management, and more. As you watch these videos, you will gain an understanding of the most common database scaling problems and how these are addressed using a variety of scaling techniques.
As a part of the course, you'll follow the scaling journey of a fictional game development studio called Juniper Studios and their game GalaxySurfer. You'll see how the scaling techniques discussed can help this organization scale up to meet its customer demand.
This course is going to have a variety of content styles. Sometimes, you'll see me teaching and explaining scaling concepts. We also try to include animations to help as visual aids and even jump into screen share to demonstrate scaling principles with MySQL and the PlanetScale platform.
It's worth noting that many of the concepts and strategies covered in this course can be used with either vanilla MySQL or Vitess. MySQL is one of the world's most popular open-source SQL databases used by some of the largest companies in the world to power their applications. Vitess is a database clustering system originally created by YouTube to help them scale databases horizontally. It is now also an open source CNCF project, used by some of the web's largest applications like Slack, Etsy, Pinterest, GitHub, and more. We here at PlanetScale provide fully managed Vitess and PostgreSQL databases, and as such, you'll see some usage of our product and interface in several of the videos.