System Design: Key Concepts and Terminology

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and definitions related to system design concepts from the lecture.

Database Isolation Levels

Different levels that control how transaction integrity is visible to other transactions.

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service; provides virtualized computing resources over the internet.

PaaS

Platform as a Service; delivers hardware and software tools over the internet, typically for application development.

SaaS

Software as a Service; software distribution model where applications are hosted by a service provider and made available online.

SSO

Single Sign-On; an authentication process that allows a user to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials.

MVCC

Multi-Version Concurrency Control; a database method that allows multiple transactions to occur without locking resources.

HTTPS

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure; an extension of HTTP that provides secure communication over the internet.

Optimal Locking

A method to manage concurrency where transactions are allowed to occur without locking resources unless necessary.

CDN

Content Delivery Network; a system of distributed servers that deliver web content to users based on their geographic location.

Erasure Coding

A data protection technology that breaks data into fragments, expands it with redundant data pieces, and stores it across a set of locations.

Order Book

An electronic list of buy and sell orders organized by price levels.

Quadtree

A tree data structure that is used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into four quadrants.

Replication Lag

The delay between when a transaction is written to a primary database and when it is available on read replicas.

Zero Copy

A method of transferring data that minimizes the number of copies to save time and resources.

HMAC

Hash-based Message Authentication Code; a specific construction for creating a message authentication code involving a cryptographic hash function.

Cache Miss Attack

A scenario in which a high volume of database queries triggers a large number of cache misses, leading to overload.

Optimistic Locking

A concurrency control method that assumes multiple transactions can complete without conflicts.

Vertical Partitioning

A database design technique in which some columns are moved to new tables, reducing the width of the original table.

Horizontal Partitioning

The process of distributing rows of a database table across multiple tables, often called sharding.

Latency vs. Consistency Tradeoff

The balancing act between the speed at which data can be accessed (latency) and the accuracy/updated state of that data (consistency) in distributed systems.