Why Scale at the Data Tier?
In previous articles we covered vertical scaling and horizontal scaling at the web app tier—the API servers, the app servers. The same question applies at the data tier. If you have a single database, how do you scale it?
- Vertical scaling means increasing the horsepower of the server hosting the database: more CPU, more RAM, bigger disk.
- Horizontal scaling means not one bigger database, but multiple databases. Each holds a subset of the data. Together they form the full dataset. That's data partitioning.