Scaling Flickr, and Other Huge Databases

Microsoft's James Hamilton has been collecting scaling stories for a while, and has shared a list of resources providing insider accounts of how the Web's largest sites have managed their scalability challenges. The post focuses on Flickr's database architecture, but also provides links to similar accounts for Amazon, LinkedIn, Second Life, CraigsList and MySpace. Readers focused on scalability may also be interested in Breakthrough Failures That Help Sites Scale.

As we noted in that story, many of the toughest scaling challenges involve databases. This week Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote about database normalization, sparking a conversation that Todd Hoff at High Scalability has dubbed "the mother of all database normalization debates."