How Notion Scaled to 100 Million Users Without Their Database Exploding

In this video, we will explore how Notion managed to scale to 100 million users without exploding their database.

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[kikisbytes]

Notion hit 100 million users recently so I wanted to do quick cover of their database evolution. Hope you get to learn something from this. Thank you again for taking the time to watch this video and for your continued support!

[jackdavenport]

This video has made me realise how much of a nightmare it must be to scale up a database in production. But Notion is insanely fast now so it obviously paid off well.

[GuRuGeorge]

coming up with this solution is tough for sure but the real challange is orchestrating all the teams and people involved in this. that job is incredible and I bet there were a few key people who managed all this and had to do a lot of overtime to achieve it, especially when critical errors & bugs popped up

[тимур_атмосферный]

bro casually dropped 1mil+ youtuber level content

[smithwillnot]

What do you want to shard?
Notion engineers: YES

[foreverskeptical]

Your videos are so short and clean. Even though I am just a recent grad I get a lot of value from these vids. also didnt realize you could scale so much wwith postgresql

[andrefu]

insanely underrated channel, you're gonna be huge

[ask_carbon]

Good god I feel tired just going through this can't even imagine the stress on DBAs and System architects in Notion

[captdev]

This is crasy good content dude! You will be 1+ million views in no time

[siddair]

Great video!! Loved this level of detail along with the animations. This is a differentiating factor from many other videos on such topics that don't go into detail but cover such topics at a very high level. You could link to explanations of some of the concepts mentioned for understanding but continue keeping this level of detail as that is what makes it great in the first place!

[GlynnPowell]

This is great PR for Notion. I loved Notion when it arrived, went all in, then it slowed to a painful pace so I jumped to Obsidian.... This has got me buzzed to come back to Notion! Great video

[code]

Engineering team at notion did a fantastic job !

[kiro_f]

These videos are always so good, always happy to see when a new one is posted :)

[kaffii]

Great video! Just want to appreciate your videos as no one else does good summaries of engineering blogs or writeups, and I appreciate the lack of dilution of the concepts since there's just way too much content catered to beginners and not enough of more mid-level content like yours (digestable, consumable summaries of interesting solution architecture writeups) out there on YouTube.

[bhaaratsharma]

We recently did a db upscale with around 12tb of data which is just a fraction of what Notion did and it was already a herculion task for us. It took us weeks of planning and work to make it a success. Working with data is one of the most challenging things in IT

[TokuyuuTV]

so educational and entertaining at the same time!! i know nothing about systems but the video was so well-paced and funny I kept watching

[RatonBroyeur]

Great video. Great topic. Adapting your infrastructure to your customer growth is one of the hardest thing to do. Sooo many constraints. Great job notion !

[SolomonSunder]

A company I worked for faced similar issues during Covid. We were IOPS heavy, relied on SMB, Windows nested folders additionally. It was fixed using a technique similar to what Notion did here.

[Redyf]

What an amazing video, production quality at its highest level. 😁

[bobby_tablez]

Incredible video.
I can't help but feel like, at some point, humanity will stumble upon the right paradigm of data distribution.
There's no way this is the ideal method of scaling, right?
It seems to me like much of the effort companies put into scaling is simply undoing flawed assumptions made by the underlying database.