Are you getting tired of MySQL headaches and facing scaling issues for your Laravel applications? Or perhaps you are looking for something that allows faster aggregations and analytical queries?
If this sounds like you, then the recent course published by Jack Ellis from Fathom Analytics is for you. Singlestore for Laravel is a video course, with code examples, designed to help you switch from your standard Laravel database driver to something that will blow your socks off from 50 paces.
In the Laravel community, there has been a lot of chatter around Singlestore, what it is and what it can do for you. Jack, of course, spearheaded this conversation when they switched over from Dynamo DB at Fathom Analytics. He has been highly transparent with the goings on in his company, allowing us all to learn the lessons they learned at scale.
Let's get back to the course, though. At the time of writing, there are 20 fantastic videos walking you through a dummy application called Acme Bank. In the course, we discuss the main differences between MySQL and Singlestore, the performance benefits, and how you can utilize Singlestore in your Laravel application.
There are a few foreign concepts you will pick up about how to work with a distributed database, mostly around using fewer foreign keys and sharding your data into partitions. One example Jack has been very vocal about is how he uses Singlestore to replace Redis or other cache systems in his product. To me, this is a breath of fresh air.
Having scaled products myself to various levels, never Jack's level, of course, Mysql and Redis are one of the biggest headaches. Managing replica databases and Redis clusters can be a real pain to do. You end up with your source of truth not being in a single location but instead split across multiple locations.
Having watched this course myself, I highly recommend this to anyone - whether they are worrying about scale or looking to move to a database system that will simplify their infrastructure and support them as they grow.
You can find the course here, and I recommend you do a little reading into the benefits of Singlestore too. It will surprise you!