The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser Hussein Nasser

Correction: Google is implementing the proposal originally submitted by researchers from Georgia institute of tech. I incorrectly said in the video that google is proposing this .

Google is finally implementing a proposal from 2008 by researchers from Georgia institute of technology to make DNS cache poisoning .

https://astrolavos.gatech.edu/articles/increased_dns_resistance.pdf

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-vixie-dnsext-dns0x20-00

0:00 Intro

2:00 How DNS Work

5:00 DNS Cache Poisoning

14:00 gOoGLe dot CoM

16:20 ASCII 0x20 casing

18:30 Randomizing the casing with encryption

22:30 limitations of this proposal

24:00 Credits

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/increasing-magic-pocket-write-throughput-by-removing-our-ssd-cache-disks

In this episode of the backend engineering show I’ll discuss how Dropbox improved their write through put by 20% by removing all their SSDs (yes I was surprised too). DropBox uses an SSD layer as a write-back cache with SMR drives as their backend persistent storage. They changed their model to write directly to the hard drives.

0:00 Intro

2:00 Article Summary

3:00 SMR Drives

6:00 SSD Cache & WriteBack

8:00 Replacing Cache

9:30 Storage Engine Background

14:30 Why did they do it

15:00 The limitation of SSDs & Zoned Namespaces

19:30 Updating the Storage Engine

22:30 Tradeoffs

26:00 Rollout

28:00 Summary

The communication between backend applications and database systems always fascinated me. The protocols keep evolving and we are in constant search for an efficient protocol that best fit the workload of Backend-DB communication.

In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through a blog written by  @PlanetScale  doing an experimentation of using HTTP/3 and HTTP/2 comparing it with MySQL Binary protocol.

https://planetscale.com/blog/faster-mysql-with-http3

0:00 Intro

7:45 MySQL Binary vs HTTP

10:20 The Tests

15:00 Connection Cost + Select 1

22:00 Parallel Select

26:00 The cost of H2 and H3

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https://database.husseinnasser.com

Shopify posted a blog on tips to for scalable payment system, one tip peeked my interest related to switching from UUID to ULID. I explore the reasoning behind this in this video.

https://shopify.engineering/building-resilient-payment-systems

0:00 Intro

1:30 idempotency

6:30 UUID vs ULID

9:50 Clustered Index

13:30 Why UUID4 Inserts are slow

17:15 How ULID helps Shopify

22:00 Problem with tail pages

25:00 Does ULID help in all cases?

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https://backend.husseinnasser.com

I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from how MySQL or PostgreSQL store rows. Everything goes to disk, the trick is to fetch what you need from disk efficiently with as fewer I/Os as possible, the rest is API.  In this video I discuss the evolution of MongoDB internal architecture on how documents are stored and retrieved focusing on the index storage representation. I assume the reader is well versed with fundamentals of database engineering such as indexes, B+Trees, data files, WAL etc, you may pick up my database course to learn the skills. Let us get started.





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The User Interface/User Experience has great impact on the backend architecture and scalability. In this podcast I discuss three UI/UX that affected backend design and scalability.

0:00 Intro

1:40 UI vs UX

4:30 Google Chrome OmniBox

12:30 1 out of X Page

20:00 YouTube Notification

Resources

https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/21/chromiums-impact-on-root-dns-traffic/

Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

https://backend.husseinnasser.com