{"id":499,"date":"2022-03-01T17:36:59","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T22:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/?p=499"},"modified":"2022-03-01T17:37:01","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T22:37:01","slug":"book-review-designing-data-intensive-applications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/01\/book-review-designing-data-intensive-applications\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Designing Data-Intensive Applications"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\"Book
I\u2019m so glad I read Designing Data-Intensive Applications<\/a> by Martin Kleppmann!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Designing Data-Intensive Applications<\/a> by Martin Kleppmann is a tour de force, a wonderful book for anyone interested in learning about the kinds of applications where data is the key constraint.  Kleppmann\u2019s central thesis is that applications are rarely CPU-bound, especially given that CPUs are not getting much faster, and parallelism is on the rise.  You\u2019ve probably heard that Internet companies and hyperscalers achieve their amazing scale via horizontal scaling rather than vertical scaling (adding more servers instead of making each server bigger).  This book fundamentally lays out how that is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a university student, I did not fully appreciate how relational databases worked so well until the instructor did a lesson on B-trees.  I knew a primary law of computing: \u201c\u2019never\u2019 go to the disk\u201d, but could not fathom how that was possible.  On seeing a B-tree I first thought \u201cwhat an amazingly odd data structure\u201d.  Then I had a flash of insight, on how this data structure prevented you from searching a disk for some database record (assuming you had enough RAM to keep the B-tree in memory).  That one lesson made four years of computer theory make sense.  Designing Data-Intensive Applications<\/a> had the same impact on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Wide
B-trees are even wider than this! Photo by niko photos<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book starts with a definition of scalability: a system\u2019s ability to deal with increased load.   Kleppmann reminds the reader to never say \u201cX doesn\u2019t scale\u201d but instead to address \u201cif a system grows in a certain way, how can we deal with the growth?\u201d.  (This is a much more thoughtful question than you often see on Internet forums!)  That key point is worth repeating \u2013 scaling is not a binary question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kleppmann starts at the beginning.  The book dives into common data structures used, even in single-system applications.  I even got to see B-trees again!  After each structure is introduced, he starts describing how these structures can work when more machines are added.   \u201cHorizontal scaling\u201d seems easy to talk about, but Kleppmann describes how it actually works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A key concern in data-intensive applications is how to keep the data consistent.  Scaling is generally achieved by adding more copies of things, such as application servers, worker nodes, or database replicas, but it\u2019s no small feat to keep those in sync.  When you know that anything can fail, and you don\u2019t want single points of failure, you\u2019re inclined to add duplicates.  But if there are two independent write operations to the same record, which should win?  It\u2019s challenging in a single-server scenario and even harder when multiple servers are involved.   Kleppmann walks through all of the scenarios, the common solutions, and the tradeoffs involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A delightful bonus is that each chapter is adorned with a Tolkien-like map.  Seeing \u201cThe Land of the B-Trees\u201d and the \u201cLog Structured Storage\u201d in relation to the \u201cKingdom of Analytics\u201d was a fun way to conceptualize the different kinds of databases one may encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Map
Map for Chapter 3: Storage and Retrieval<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This book is a wonderful primer to any study of System Design and has been a wonderful complement to the microservices books I\u2019ve been reading (Microservices In Action<\/a>, Microservices Patterns<\/a>, and Microservices: A Practical Guide).  I\u2019m glad I got to revisit many concepts from those books in a different context.  Designing Data-Intensive Applications reflects a lifetime\u2019s worth of knowledge and it\u2019s easy to see how the concepts from this book have been with us since the dawn of computing.  This book is well worth the read!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann is a tour de force, a wonderful book for anyone interested in learning about the kinds of applications where data is the key constraint.  Kleppmann\u2019s central thesis is that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":504,"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}