The concept of database sharding has gained popularity over the past several years due to the enormous growth in transaction volume and size of business-application databases. This is particularly ...

Most applications need some form of persistence—a way to store the data outside the application for safekeeping. The most basic way is to write data to the file system, but that can quickly become a ...

A couple of weeks ago, in an article about the science behind the Message Machine project, we mentioned the custom key-value store we built to store non-relational data. Today, we're open sourcing the ...

Surrogate means a stand-in, a substitute. Surrogate keys take the place of a natural key as the primary key within a database table. Ideally, surrogate keys stand in the shadows and are used in ...