Database Insights

OpenSearch (Apache 2.0) and Elasticsearch (EL2/SSPL) have diverged. Compare licensing, security features, AI/ML capabilities, and migration complexity for 2026.

TiDB uses Raft consensus protocol through TiKV to replicate every region across three or more nodes. Here's how leader election, log replication, and region management work in practice.

TiDB's write path crosses multiple layers — SQL parser, planner, TiKV region leader, Raft log replication, and 2PC commit — before a transaction is durable. Here's a complete walkthrough.

Compare vector database options for AI workloads — pgvector in PostgreSQL, Pinecone, Weaviate, and Qdrant

Compare Elasticsearch, Typesense, and Meilisearch — relevance, speed, operational complexity, and when to use each

A practical guide to choosing between read replicas and caching layers — replication lag behavior, cache invalidation strategies, thundering herd prevention, tiered read architecture patterns, and decision framework.

Compare CockroachDB, Google Spanner, and YugabyteDB — consistency models, PostgreSQL compatibility, and operational costs

Deploy Vitess for horizontal MySQL sharding — VSchema design, vtgate routing, and migration from single-instance MySQL

Design multi-tenant databases — compare schema-per-tenant, row-level-security, and database-per-tenant approaches

A production guide to Citus — distributed PostgreSQL for horizontal sharding. Hypertable setup, distribution column selection, colocation for local joins, reference tables, and Citus vs native PostgreSQL partitioning.

Analyze real-world database schema designs from companies like Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb. Learn practical patterns for e-commerce, social media, and IoT applications.

A practical guide to database sharding strategies — hash sharding, range sharding, directory-based sharding — with trade-offs, resharding complexity, and decision criteria for MySQL and PostgreSQL.