High Performance SQL @ Google
There is a paper out by Google on how they migrated from MySQL to F1 for AdSense . Its fascinating reading on its own, but its got some key take-aways for scaling and reliability. I'd recommend going and reading it, but these two are worth emphasizing Scaling Eliminate the R in ORM . In short, instead of building out a nice layer (hibernate, whatever) between your DB and your code, go the other way, and deliberately expose the workings of your DB to your application developers. This actually makes tremendous sense - in many ways the advent of NoSQL has been due to people specifically picking data stores that map to their application requirements . Need a key-value store? Use Riak . Need a document store wht guaranteed writes? Use CouchDB . Hiding the specifics of your data store behind an ORM layer is - increasingly - becoming irrelevant, and Google quite probably just made it official. Fault-Tolerance Use 5 replicas. 5? Why 5...