PlanetScale Metal: Ditching the Cloud Database IO Bottleneck

2025-03-13
PlanetScale Metal: Ditching the Cloud Database IO Bottleneck

This article explores the history of computer storage technologies, from tape to hard disk drives to solid-state drives (SSDs), and the IO performance challenges brought about by cloud computing. Traditional cloud database services typically use network-attached storage (NAS), resulting in high latency and IOPS limitations. PlanetScale's Metal product uses local NVMe drives, directly connecting compute and storage, to achieve extremely low latency, unlimited IOPS, and high data durability, completely solving the IO bottleneck problem of cloud databases.

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Conquering Database Counter Lock Contention: The Slotted Counter Pattern

2025-02-04
Conquering Database Counter Lock Contention: The Slotted Counter Pattern

Updating database counters in high-concurrency scenarios often leads to lock contention, causing performance degradation and even deadlocks. This article introduces a pattern called "slotted counters" that effectively mitigates lock contention by distributing counters across multiple slots. This pattern distributes update operations across multiple rows, eliminating the bottleneck of single-row updates and improving concurrency performance. GitHub used a similar solution to address counting issues; the core idea is to distribute update operations across multiple rows and then aggregate them to get the final count.

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