High-traffic websites that capture a lot of data from users often encounter performance problems when database input becomes a bottleneck. High volume user-submitted content (comments, ratings, form submissions, etc.) is typically stored in a single (master) database, and this creates problems not only for scale but also for replication and useful backups. It becomes important to be able to write these sorts of things to other secondary storage locations.
Intended audience
Developers looking to build large-volume sites who haven't built massive-scale sites before. Developers looking to build complex applications that need to integrate with Drupal, but won't necessarily need to be in Drupal.
Questions answered by this session
What is data sharding, and how does it apply to Drupal sites?
Why MongoDB and how can I use it?
How can I use a secondary MySQL database (or database cluster)?
But Drupal's APIs give me what functionality I need. How can I do all of this without reinventing the wheel?
Besides scale, what other advantages do these techniques have?
