251 - Databases at Scale with Prarthana Shiva, Sin City Ruby 2025 Speaker

Code with Jason

In this episode of Code with Jason, host Jason Swett interviews Prarthana Shiva, a senior software engineer at NexHealth, who shares how her team is handling massive database scaling challenges. Prarthana explains their PostgreSQL database's growth to 24 terabytes (with projections to triple within a year) and details their innovative solutions including read replicas, Elasticsearch implementation, Redis caching, external write-ahead logs, and optimized vacuuming processes. The conversation also touches on Jason's own database challenges with his CI platform and concludes with Prarthana's upcoming presentation at Sin City Ruby 2025, where she'll discuss their transition from schema-based to row-based multi-tenancy for better scalability.

• Prarthana Shiva on LinkedIn
• Sin City Ruby

Chapters

1. Sin City Ruby Conference Announcement (00:00:00)

2. Introduction with Prathna Shiva (00:03:30)

3. Scaling a 24TB Database (00:05:17)

4. Read Replicas and Database Anti-Patterns (00:08:30)

5. Caching Strategies and Performance Optimization (00:20:44)

6. Write-Ahead Logs and Storage Architecture (00:24:24)

7. Vacuuming and Database Maintenance (00:32:31)

8. Sin City Ruby Speaking Engagement (00:43:08)