1. Sam Ghods VP Technology

2. The simplest way for businesses to share and access data, anywhere

4. 12 months ago… 400M files 40M folders One MySQL database

5. Need to scale!

6. NoSQL!

7. “NoSQL” goodies Easy to scale – Just add machines! – Sharding handled by the database – Linearly scales, shared-nothing, no serious SPOF Fast, fairly simple CRUD operations Schema-less

8. Not so fast.

9. We sharded MySQL instead.

10. Why???

11. If you use a NoSQL store, but need any advanced features in your data store, you have to rebuild them from scratch yourself.

12. If you are willing to partition your data yourself, you can use MySQL’s fancy features.

13. Inter-Row Consistency

14. Inter-Row Consistency File trees must remain consistent Folder A – Test File Solution: unique index Solution: lock folder A

15. Inter-Row Consistency Modify data structure and log event Folder A – Test File 1

16. Inter-Row Consistency Modify data structure and log event Folder A – Test File 2 Solution: Use transactions  rename event

17. Inter-Row Consistency Denormalizations Folder A – Test File 1 Solution: transactions  delete  this must be deleted too

18. Indexes Indexes are way more awesome than people give them credit for – Guaranteed to be consistent – Extremely fast – Data locality – Only access and pull the data you need – No maintenance required except initial ALTER cost SELECT files ORDER BY name (or updated time, or size, etc…)

19. Tools How do you know what’s happening in your data store? – SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST – innotop Benchmarking tools – mysqlslap pt-query-digest – github.com/box/anemometer

20. Maturity/Reliability Biggest companies in the world have been using MySQL for primary data storage for over a decade – Facebook, Google, Twitter, every other company ever When you’re dealing with the crown jewels of your company, you can’t experiment

21. HBase!

22. HBase Currently using it as a massive event- propagation store (which can be recreated from MySQL data) Started a 3-person task force to learn and productionalize it Considering moving more to it in the future but likely need few more years of production experience

23. Final Thoughts Don’t choose a database just because “it scales” “Wade, don’t jump into new technologies.” If you go with new technology, be aware that crazy things might happen Make sure you’re not rebuilding MySQL

24. Hiring! sam@box.com