DBSlayer - Trac

The DBacesslayer aka DBSlayer aka Släyer (as we like to call it when we're feeling ironically heavy metal) is a lightweight database abstraction layer suitable for high-load websites where you need the scalable advantages of connection pooling. Written in C for speed, DBSlayer talks to clients via JSON over HTTP, meaning it's simple to monitor and can swiftly interoperate with any web framework you choose.

The DBSlayer originated as an internal tool at the New York Times. The typical LAMP strategy for scaling up data-driven applications is to replicate slave databases to every web server, but this approach can hit scaling limitations for high-volume websites, where processes can overwhelm their given backend DB's connection limits. Quite frankly, we wanted to scale the front-end webservers and backend database servers separately without having to coordinate them. We also needed a way to flexibly reconfigure where our backend databases were located and which applications used them without resorting to tricks of DNS or other such "load-balancing" hacks. Plus, it just seemed really cool to have a JSON-speaking DB layer that all our scriptable content could talk to. Thus, the DBSlayer was born.

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