Determining a data storage solution as your web application scales can be the most difficult part. MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, Riak, Cassandra, Voldemort, NoSQL, MySQL, NewSQL, etc, all claim to be elastic, fault-tolerant, durable and give great performance for reads and writes. I'll discuss different storage solutions and explain what's really important when choosing a datastore - your application data schema and feature requirements.

Almost any datastore can scale as long as you use it the right way.

Hailo, the taxi app, has served more than 5 million passengers in 15 cities and has taken fares of $100 million this year. I'm going to talk about how that rapid growth has been powered by a platform based on Cassandra and operational analytics and insights powered by Acunu Analytics. I'll cover some challenges and lessons learned from scaling fast!

Apache CouchDB is a versatile JSON document data store with novel features, an interesting history and an exciting future. I'll discuss how CouchDB works, some of the use cases it's exposed and where it's headed. I'll cover the past and its influencers. I'll discuss what's available in CouchDB and how people exploit it in production today. I'll consider the future of its ecosystem and its evolution toward large distributed systems.

My talk is about storing data locally on browsers, including mobile browsers with IndexedDB, which is selected as an official database for the web standard by W3C.

Tired of relational schemas slowing you down and being hard to change? It doesn't need to be that way! Learn how to run document stores inside of PostgreSQL, how to query and alter data with code running inside the database, and how you can manage schema changes for easy deploys and zero downtime.

We've played with a lot of tech at GoSquared. Coded with PHP, Ruby, JavaScript + Node.js; chatted to many databases including MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, SimpleDB and Cassandra; used AWS so much it's nearly unhealthy. I'll explore the problems faced, the tech choices, the scaling challenges, etc. I'll share lessons learned - what worked, what exploded and why - and discuss how a team of teenagers and twenty-somethings developed a leading, real-time web analytics service.

What happens when you pick the wrong data store? A few years ago, open source web application Diaspora did just that. We started out on MongoDB, and then after eight months in production, switched to MySQL.

With eight months of production data to convert, it was not a switch we made lightly. I'll talk about the mechanics of how it was done, as well as the motivations for the original choice, and how we knew when it was time.

Are you running a database in the cloud? Worried that you're doing it wrong?

Engine Yard supports a broad set of databases with flexibility for customers to modify and configure. However, freedom to adapt and extend standard functionality comes with unexpected negative consequences: modifications can seriously affect durability and performance. I've observed common problems, patterns and best practices with big (and not so big) data. I'll highlight the most common pitfalls and discuss how to avoid them.

"Eventual consistency! Scalability! Schema-free!" is the rallying call of the NoSQL world. But what does it mean to be eventually-consistent, to be scalable, to be schema-free? Why should you, as a web developer, care? Let's demystify these terms and then explore some ways that Riak, an "eventually-consistent, scalable, schema-free" datastore, can be put to practical use in web applications. You might just find that you've been using eventual consistency all along!

MySQL - the most popular open-source database in production today but notoriously difficult to scale horizontally. Two years ago Box was running its entire website off a single MySQL database, traffic was growing aggressively, we needed a solution. I'll discuss how we transitioned our stack to a fully sharded MySQL architecture, with no downtime, while serving 2 billion queries per day. I'll focus on challenges of migrating a live website and lessons learned.