Throughout colleges and in development teams around the world, software developers are explicitly and implicitly taught a number of database principles: Normalization, avoid duplicating data storage, don't over-constrain your queries, and many others. In high scale web applications dealing with billions of requests, there are a number of these "rules" that commonly have to be broken. Bazaarvoice has over a terabyte of data in MySQL instances, and serves over a billion requests per month, however, as the Bazaarvoice backend scaled to this size, the team recognized a number of compromises made along the way and documented them in this presentation.

If you're worried about your application's scalability, or how to handle the onslaught of traffic when your new site launches, this presentation will give you some great techniques to consider and will introduce you to Engineers who've done this before. You'll hear us talk about which of these compromises paid off, and which we still regret. In addition to scaling on MySQL, we'll also talk briefly about other datastores we've used in conjunction with MySQL, when just an RDBMS wasn't enough.

Scott Bonneau is the VP of Engineering at Bazaarvoice, He is an experienced engineering manager with a proven track record of delivering Google-scale projects and building and organizing world-class engineering teams. Scott has proven himself as a team leader with excellent individual management and mentoring abilities, and as a systems architect who is not afraid to roll up the sleeves and crank out code when need be. Since joining Bazaarvoice he has been instrumental in the formation of the Data team, whose sole focus has been to create and maintain a datastore capable of managing terabytes of data and billions of requests per month.

Scott Bonneau

Vice President of Engineering for Bazaarvoice

RC Johnson is the New York City Development Manager at Bazaarvoice, Originally starting as a Senior Software Engineer, RC has been a part of the myriad of changes the backend systems have gone through over the last four plus years of exponential growth. With his recent background in technology, RC is now leading the creation of a New York based Bazaarvoice Engineering team working on complex problems and large datasets.