In today’s world, it’s no surprise that people have become accustomed to getting answers to their questions in near real time. Even waiting a few seconds for a page to load can seem like an eternity. Google found that when a webpage takes 10 seconds to load, as opposed to 1 second, a visitor is 123% more likely to leave the site and look for their answer somewhere else. 1
In psychology, there’s a concept called Flow State, which you may have heard people refer to as being wired in or in the zone. According to Wikipedia, “It’s the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.” 2 Any distraction can break someone out of the zone such as a choppy interface, slow refresh rates, or loading icons.
Whether you’re building a personal blog or scaling an application to millions of users, making sure your users have the best possible experience should be one of your primary concerns. If it takes too long to load, people will become impatient and leave.
There are a lot of things that contribute to how fast or slow your application is; however, one of the biggest factors is the speed of your database queries. Any database has a finite amount of resources. Shaving off milliseconds not only improves that query; it allows the server to allocate more resources to other queries, which will help keep their execution time more consistent.
This book will help teach the concepts needed to get the most out of your databases.
Data pipelines and ETL processes exist so that data can be effectively analyzed and actions can be taken. These processes usually consist of a variety of intense queries paired with a large number of simple ones. After optimizing, data will be available on a more frequent cadence. Speeding up the feedback cycle will allow more data driven decisions to be made.
This book will help with understanding what is happening inside databases so that you can make the necessary changes to speed up your processes.
The primary responsibility of a DBA should be to ensure the database servers are running smoothly. This book goes into detail about how to diagnose hardware bottlenecks and touches on how to set up the server from an ops perspective.
In addition, a DBA spends a large portion of their time acting as a database consultant. They help people speed up queries and optimize schemas. Because the answer to every database question begins with “it depends”, this book goes into detail about what tools and techniques are right for different situations.