The catch-22 of read/write splitting

In my previous post I covered the shard-disk paradigm's pros and cons, but the conclusion that is that it cannot really qualify as a scale-out solution, when it comes to massive OLTP, big-data, big-sessions-count and mixture of reads and writes.

Read/Write splitting is achieved when numerous replicated database servers are used for reads. This way the system can scale to cope with increase in concurrent load. This solution qualifies as a scale-out solution as it allow expansion beyond the boundaries of one DB, DB machines are shared-nothing, can be added as a slave to the replication "group" when required.

And, as a fact, read/write splitting is very popular and widely used by lots of high-traffic applications such as popular web sites, blogs, mobile apps, online games and social applications. 

However, today's extreme challenges of big-data, increased load and advance requirements expose vulnerabilities and flaws in this solution. Let's summarize them here:

• All writes go to the master node = bottleneck: While reading sessions are distributed across several database servers (replication slaves), writing sessions are all going to the same primary/master server, hence still a bottleneck, all of them will consume all resources from the DB for our well-known "buffer management, locking, thread locks/semaphores, and recovery tasks"
• Scaled sessions' load, not big data: While I can take my, X reading sessions and spread them over my 5 replication slaves giving each to handle with only X/5 sessions, however my giant DB will have to be replicated as a whole to all servers. Prepare lots of disks...
• Scale? Yes. Query performance? No: Queries on each read-replica need to cope with the entire data of the database. No parallelism, to smaller data sets to handle
• Replication lag: Async replication will always introduce lag. Be prepared for a lag between the reads and the writes.
• Reads after write will show missing data. The transaction is not yet committed so it's not written to the log, not propagated to salve machine, not applied at the slave DB. 

Above all, databases suffer from writes made by many concurrent sessions. Database engine themselves become bottleneck because of their *buffer management, locking, thread locks/semaphores, and recovery tasks*. Reads are a secondary target. BTW - reads performance and scale can be very well gained by good smart caching, use of a NoSQL such as Memcached in the app, in front of the RDBMS. In modern applications we see more and more avoided reads and writes, that cannot be avoided or cached, storming the DB.

R/W splitting is usually implemented today inside the application code, the it's easy to start, then becomes hard... I recommend using a specialized COTS product that does it 100 times better and may eliminate some or all limitations above (ScaleBase is one solution that gives that (among other things)).

This is read/write splitting's catch 22. It's an OK scale-out solution and relatively easy to implement, but improvement of caching systems, changing requirements in the online applications and big-data and big-concurrency - rapidly driving it towards its fate, become less and less relevant, and only play a partial role in a complete scale-out plan. 

In a complete scale-out solution, where data is distributed (not replicated) throughout a grid of shared-nothing databases, read/write splitting will play its part, but only a minor one. Will get to that in next posts.