System Design
Databases
Every system starts with data. Master storage before anything else.
Relational Database Fundamentals
ACID Properties & Transactions
Isolation Levels & Concurrency
Indexing Strategies & Query Optimization
OLTP vs OLAP: Choosing the Right Database Workload
Database Scaling Patterns
Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
Read Replicas & Write Scaling
Sharding Strategies & Partition Keys
NoSQL & Specialized Databases
SQL vs NoSQL Trade-offs
Document Stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB)
Wide-Column Stores (Cassandra, HBase)
Graph Databases & Specialized Stores
Database Internals
B-Trees vs LSM Trees
Write-Ahead Logging & Durability
Connection Pooling & Query Execution
Advanced Query Mechanics
SQL JOIN Algorithms
9 min
Query Optimization & EXPLAIN
10 min
Normalization & Denormalization Trade-offs
8 min
Distributed Consistency
Two-Phase Commit & Distributed Transactions
10 min
Consistency Models & Guarantees
9 min
Search & Indexing Fundamentals
Search Engine Internals & Text Analysis
Scaling Search, Relevance & System Design
Blob & Object Storage
Object Storage Fundamentals & the Metadata Pattern
6 min
Uploads, Presigned URLs & Multipart Transfers
8 min
Durability, Access Control & Cost Optimization
9 min