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Rootconf topical edition on Databases

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Mallikarjun

Mallikarjun

@rda3mon

Looking beyond what meets the eye -- DB Platform Engineer perspective

Submitted May 7, 2026

Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

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, practical constraints, etc. In this talk we are going to double click on what all aspects do we look at while evaluating a database for their database customers from a database platform engineer prespective

This session provides a comprehensive framework for moving beyond “default” choices to select a database with key value as an example access pattern based on objective criteria. I will break down the selection process into actions while addressing the fundamental trade-offs at every step of decision making. 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
  • Observability requirements on how to peep into the internal workings
  • Fault Tolerence and what are needs of application

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.

Draft Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ULu7xfoJuj_goY5lUL9GaklWfW0Ih3yy/view?usp=drivesdk

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