Structured Roadmap

Database Design Roadmap

Master the backbone of every distributed system. A complete guide to database modeling, sharding, and replication for system design interviews.

1

Core Database Concepts

Understand the fundamental differences between relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL stores (Cassandra, MongoDB), and Key-Value stores (Redis, DynamoDB).

2

Data Replication and Partitioning

When your data exceeds the capacity of a single node, you must shard it. Learn consistent hashing, master-slave replication, leaderless replication, and quorum consensus.

3

Caching and Fast Retrieval

Databases are often the bottleneck in distributed systems. Learn how to use in-memory caches, CDN layers, and materialized views to speed up read-heavy applications.