EP36: Types of Databases and Use Cases

This week’s system design refresher:

• How does HTTPS work? (Youtube video)

• Types of databases and use cases

• ElasticSearch

• REST API Design

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How does HTTPS work?

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How do you decide which type of database to use?

There are hundreds or even thousands of databases available today, such as Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, MongoDB, S3, Ceph, etc. How do you select the architecture for your system? My short summary is as follows:

• Relational database. Almost anything could be solved by them. 

• In-memory store. Their speed and limited data size make them ideal for fast operations.

• Time-series database. Store and manage time-stamped data.

• Graph database. It is suitable for complex relationships between unstructured objects.

• Document store. They are good for large immutable data.

• Wide column store. They are usually used for big data, analytics, reporting, etc., which needs denormalized data.

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How do we learn ElasticSearch?

Based on the Lucene library, Elasticsearch provides search capabilities. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. The diagram below shows the outline.

Features of ElasticSearch:

• Real-time full-text search

• Analytics engine

• Distributed Lucene

ElasticSearch use cases:

• Product search on an eCommerce website

• Log analysis

• Auto completer, spell checker

• Business intelligence analysis

• Full-text search on Wikipedia

• Full-text search on StackOverflow

The core of ElasticSearch lies in the data structure and indexing. It is important to understand how ES builds the term dictionary using LSM Tree (Log-Strucutured Merge Tree).

👉 Over to you: Have you used ElasticSearch in your project, and what is it for?

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How does REST API work?

What are its principles, methods, constraints, and best practices? I hope the diagram below gives you a quick overview.

Blog post by Love Sharma.

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