Mallikarjun

Mallikarjun

@rda3mon

Choosing the Right Database for your Workload -- Beyond Personal Experience

Submitted May 7, 2026

Database is an organised collection of structured data stored on one or more database servers. A distributed database is a single logical database that is spread across multiple database servers. Every production grade functional application which needs to persist its state durably needs a production grade database, in today’s world a distributed database.

Choosing the right database is one of the most critical architectural decisions a team can make, yet many a times choices made are sub optimal due to multiple reasons such as lack of understanding, lack of expertise, and other practical constraints. In this talk we are going to deep dive into category -- lack of understanding and more specifically Non relational side of the world to not get into less rationale sql vs no-sql dilemma .

This session provides a comprehensive framework for moving beyond “default” choices to select a data store based on objective criteria. In this talk, I will break down the selection process into actionable dimensions while addressing the fundamental trade-offs. Some key areas covered are

  • Functional requirements such as Consistency vs Availability
  • Performance requirements and how to assess the performance
  • Non functional capabilities such as backups, change data capture, etc
  • Client side abstractions
  • Observability requirements

Take aways

Key take aways of this talk are

  • Help engineers make a decision on the right database selection for their workload meeting the functional and non functional requirements
  • Understanding the prespective of how database platform teams think through while addressing the requirements of their customer application teams

Audience

This talk is going to help

  • End application engineers make a database selection more rationally
  • Platform engineers to talk to their application engineers while providing a database choice
  • General tech enthusiasts to get into deeper details on how database selection is made.

Bio

Name: Mallikarjun
Company: Flipkart
Bio: Architect at flipkart leading non relational database platform.

Comments

{{ gettext('Login to leave a comment') }}

{{ gettext('Post a comment…') }}
{{ gettext('New comment') }}
{{ formTitle }}

{{ errorMsg }}

{{ gettext('No comments posted yet') }}

Hosted by

We care about site reliability, cloud costs, security and data privacy