There's nothing new or exciting about relational databases. We abstract them away with ORMS, grudgingly write a query here or there, but generally try to forget about them entirely. Then the performance and scalability problems begin. “Shading, the secret ingredient to the web-scale sauce” often won't help us.

The database is at the heart of nearly every system we build. Reading data and writing data account for the majority of performance bottlenecks. When it comes to SQL and relational databases, the syntax is easy, but the concepts often aren't. The most important knowledge is not obvious but it is necessary to make the right design, query, and optimization decisions.

Indexing, a glimpse under the hood of the storage engine and the query optimizer, and some best practices are all you need to know bring your DB skills head and shoulders above your peers and ready to build bigger, better, faster apps.