Company
Date Published
Author
Rick Negrin
Word count
1246
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Scaling distributed systems is challenging due to various factors such as the need for dynamic resource allocation and maintenance of service level agreements. Databases are particularly hard to scale because they involve multiple aspects, including CPU, RAM, storage, and SQL objects. The growth in data ingestion per unit time, concurrent queries, working set, and number of SQL objects require different scaling strategies. Most legacy databases only support a single-box model, which limits scalability and makes it difficult to handle unexpected growth without downtime. In contrast, scale-out relational databases like SingleStore can easily scale by adding new nodes to a cluster, allowing for online operations with no downtime.