I'm the owner of Domain51, author of the first published book on Git and quickly becoming a rabid Lawrencian. On here I write about the business, our code, our clients, our mission. My code is online, my status is pretty easy to figure out, and in case you want to stalk me, I'm pretty easy to find.
There are two kinds of scalability: vertical and horizontal. Vertical scaling is just adding more capacity to a single machine. Virtually every database product is vertically scalable to the extent that they can make good use of more CPU cores[1], RAM, and disk space. With a horizontally scalable system, it’s possible to add capacity by adding more machines. By far, most database products are not horizontally scalable.
But, people have been scaling products like MySQL for years, so how’d they do it?
