Database Reliability Engineering

Preface

In this book, we hope to show you a framework for the next iteration of the database professional: the database reliability engineer, or DBRE. Consider any preconceived notions of what the profession of database administration looks like. Any software or systems engineer who has interacted with these mysterious creatures probably has a lot of these preconceived notions.

Traditionally, database administrators (DBAs) understood database (DB) internals thoroughly; they ate, lived, and breathed the optimizer, the query engine, and the tuning and crafting of highly performant, specialized systems. When they needed to pick up other skill sets to make their databases run better, they did. They learned how to distribute load across computer processing units (CPUs) or disk spindles, how to configure their DB to use CPU affinity, and how to evaluate storage subsystems.

When the DBA ran into visibility problems, they learned how to build graphs for the things they identified as key metrics. When they ran into architectural limitations, they learned about caching tiers. When they ran into the limits of individual nodes, they learned (and helped drive the development of) new design patterns like sharding. Throughout this, they were mastering new operational techniques, such as cache invalidation, data rebalancing, and rolling DB changes.

But for a long long time, DBAs were in the business of crafting silos and snowflakes. Their tools were different, their hardware was different, and ...