As developers, we all aim to craft code that performs exceptionally well in production. This principle applies not only to application code but also to our databases! Imagine the confidence of making changes without worry, deploying stress-free, and receiving automated assurance that your updates to the database or business logic won’t disrupt your production environment. Curious about achieving this? Keep reading to find out how.
How to Make Databases Fast
In today’s fast-paced development environment, we often deploy code multiple times a day while juggling numerous tasks simultaneously. Our applications span across dozens of clusters and interact with hundreds of databases. Working on multi-tenant platforms, we frequently tailor solutions to meet specific requirements. With such complexity, it’s no surprise that things can go wrong, making it a constant challenge to keep everything running smoothly.
Continuous database reliability is a game-changer when it comes to building robust services. It ensures that our designs perform effectively in production and scale seamlessly to meet customer demands. Traditional load tests, while valuable, are becoming less common due to the challenges of creating and maintaining them. Even when available, relying on load tests is impractical because they occur late in the pipeline and take too long to complete. To streamline the development process, we need tools that enable us to quickly validate queries and schema changes, shortening the feedback loop and ensuring scalability earlier in the cycle.
Most industry solutions fall short of addressing these challenges. Unit tests, for instance, only verify the correctness of queries - ensuring we read and write data as expected - but they don’t assess performance. They won’t flag slow joins, N+1 queries, or missing indexes. Similarly, while many tools exist for deploying schema changes, they cannot often evaluate critical aspects such as the speed of schema updates, the risk of data loss, or provide clear insights into how the new schema will look. They don’t warn us if schema modifications will trigger extensive table rewrites or lengthy operations that could run for hours.
Metis safeguards developers and engineering teams from these challenges. With Metis, you can ensure the correctness of your designs and have your queries and schema migrations validated even before committing changes to the repository. Keep reading to discover the full range of benefits Metis offers.
Metis Takes Care of Your Databases
Metis offers a wide range of features, including robust database guardrails. It seamlessly integrates into your development workflow and CI/CD pipelines, automatically validating queries, schema migrations, and database interactions. Let’s explore how these IDE and CI/CD integrations ensure your changes are production-ready with confidence.
With Metis integrated, all your queries are automatically checked. For example, as you run unit tests that interact with the database, Metis evaluates whether the queries will scale effectively in production. Remarkably, this happens even before you commit your code to the repository.
Metis monitors your queries, analyzes their execution plans, and highlights areas for improvement. It can simulate your query performance on a production database, alerting you if a query that runs smoothly on your local setup might not perform efficiently in production. All of this happens in real time as you write your code.
In addition to queries, Metis evaluates your schema changes. It reviews the code altering your databases, assessing whether migrations will execute efficiently, and identifying potential risks before they occur.
Metis ensures your changes are safe and ready for deployment with confidence.
It seamlessly integrates into your CI/CD pipelines, allowing you to use it alongside your favorite tools, such as GitHub Actions. This integration provides automatic checks for both performance and schema migrations, streamlining your workflow.
Metis operates automatically within your pipelines, functioning as a CI/CD solution specifically tailored for your databases.
It validates the correctness of your design in real time, eliminating the need to wait for load tests to finish. Instead, you gain immediate insights while implementing your changes.
Move Fast with Metis
Developers encounter numerous challenges, and existing tools often fall short. No other solution on the market can ensure that queries will perform efficiently in production or that schema migrations won’t trigger costly table rewrites. Metis addresses these gaps by validating your designs, automatically checking queries and schema migrations, and providing the confidence needed to modify and deploy code safely to production. With Metis, you can establish true database reliability by integrating database guardrails directly into your GitOps workflow.
