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Free Apress book download courtesy of ScyllaDB

Database Performance at Scale: A Practical Guide

By Felipe Cardeneti Mendes, Piotr Sarna, Pavel Emelyanov and Cynthia Dunlop


Discover new ways to optimize database performance — and avoid common pitfalls — in this free 270-page book

This book shares best practices for achieving predictable low latency at high throughput. It's based on learning from thousands of real-world database use cases — including Discord, Disney, Strava, Expedia, Epic Games & more. 

  • Explore often-overlooked factors that impact database performance at scale
  • Recognize the performance challenges teams face with different types of workloads
  • Select database infrastructure and topology that's suited to your needs
  • Optimize how you benchmark and monitor performance
  • Avoid common mistakes that impact latency and throughput
  • Get practical advice for navigating performance tradeoffs
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Get your free digital copy
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This book provides practical guidance for understanding the database-related opportunities, trade-offs, and traps you might encounter while trying to optimize data-intensive applications for high throughput and low latency.

Whether you are building a new system from the ground up or trying to optimize an existing use case for increased demand, this book covers the essentials.

Hear what readers are saying about Database Performance at Scale

Damn, this is an excellent resource. Lots of interesting stuff + frank discussion of how to truly evaluate different database options.”

Alex DeBrie, author of the DynamoDB Book

Glad it has a practical touch to it – helps people dealing with DBs much as it has ready-to-implement items. A delight for system design folks as well as any curious individual.”
Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer

A worthy companion to the Database Internals book!”
Pekka Enberg, author of Latency and Turso co-founder

Excellent bit of poolside reading!”
Sam Lightfoot, Engineer at JP Morgan

The book introduces you to the world of highly scalable databases with all the caveats of measuring, planning, and designing their usage and deployments. And it does so in a really good way, sprinkling nice humor here and there and showing how a well-managed scalable DB will behave if you treat it right.”
Szymon Kulec, RavenDB

About the Authors

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Felipe Mendes

Felipe Cardeneti Mendes is an IT specialist with years of experience in distributed systems and open source technologies. He has co-authored three Linux books and is a frequent speaker at public events and conferences to promote open source technologies. At ScyllaDB, he works as a Technical Director.

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Piotr Sarna

Piotr Sarna is a software engineer who is keen on open-source projects and the Rust and C++ languages. He previously developed an open-source distributed file system and had a brief adventure with the Linux kernel. He's also co-author of the Writing for Developers book. Piotr graduated from University of Warsaw with an MSc in Computer Science.

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Pavel Emelyanov

Pavel "Xemul" Emelyanov is an ex-Linux kernel hacker now speeding up row cache, tweaking the IO scheduler, and helping to pay back technical debt for component interdependencies. He is a Principal Engineer at ScyllaDB.

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Cynthia Dunlop

Cynthia Dunlop is a technology writer who specializes in software development. She has co-authored four books and hundreds of articles on everything from C/C++ memory error detection to writing engineering blogs. Cynthia holds a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a master’s degree from Washington State University.