Code as Craft

A few of us are at the Percona MySQL Conference this week in Santa Clara. Please come say hello, and if you have a chance today stop by the talk about development at scale at 1:20PM today Tuesday the 23rd in Ballroom B.

People are passionate about where they live. At Etsy we need to keep track of lots of different locations, such as buyers’ billing and shipping addresses and sellers’ shop locations. As Etsy continues to expand internationally we wanted to provide better localization and translations for our location place names. We determined that the best way […]

A little while back, we hit an extremely embarrassing issue: 32-bit signed integer overflow on some primary keys. In our architecture, an unsigned 64-bit key is generated by a global ticket server, but the sharded tables’ schemas did not use BIGINT UNSIGNED as the column data-type. Inserts into the affected tables started failing en masse […]

We’ve previously written about our sharded master-master pair database architecture and how that and the Etsy ORM allows us to perform schema changes while keeping the site up. That we can do this at all is really awesome but to actually do this is still hard, risky and time-consuming. We run the site on half of our database […]

Percona’s Xtrabackup is a great product. It performs binary backups of heavily loaded Mysql servers amazingly fast. We’ve used it here at Etsy for years and works very well for us. Mysqldump is another way of doing backups, but for servers with hundreds of gigabytes of data, it’s too slow to be useful, especially for […]

How do you make changes to your database’s structure that’s getting hammered 24×7 without any disruption? If you use Oracle and paid millions for it, it’s built in. If you use Mysql, it’s one of the holy grails of database operations, and one we’ve learned to do here at Etsy. We have a sharded architecture, […]

Dan and Wil posted a while ago about how we’re using MongoDB at Etsy. We’ve been using MongoDB as the backing store for Treasury, and over the course of two and a half months, we’ve had over 50,000 excellent Treasuries created by the Etsy community, all stored and served in MongoDB. Not so bad. I […]

Hi! Dan McKinley and Wil Stuckey from the Etsy Curation team here. We’ll be your hosts for a three-part series about the use of MongoDB here at Etsy. The Curation Team. Well, half of it. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Weinberg.) In this, the first entry, we’ll give some background on how and why we use MongoDB, […]