Ben Dicken is a developer educator at PlanetScale who combines database teaching, performance experiments and customer support. His interactive explanations show how database mechanisms affect the behavior of ordinary applications.[1]
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X · benjdicken Developer Educator · PlanetScale
Career
Before PlanetScale, Dicken was a faculty member in the University of Arizona’s computer science department and a research software engineer at Dataware. He describes his current role as combining software engineering, education and marketing, from teaching database practices to running benchmarks and supporting customers. His personal writing includes memory-access experiments and unconventional demonstrations such as displaying images with MySQL.[1]
Contributions
Scaling in response to a growing application
Dicken’s Database Scaling course follows a fictional game studio as demand grows. It introduces query tuning, partitioning, replication and caching before moving to sharding and connection management. Animations and demonstrations with MySQL and PlanetScale make each technique a response to a specific constraint. The course helps developers distinguish adding capacity from changing the way data and queries are distributed.[2]
What a transaction promises
His database-transactions article uses animated sessions and SQL examples to explain a group of operations committed as one atomic change. It then examines what concurrent sessions can see and how isolation affects their assumptions. That approach turns database terminology into observable behavior: readers can watch when a change becomes visible and understand why an application needs an explicit transaction boundary.[3]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
Database Scalingplanetscale.comA free course connecting tuning, replication, caching and sharding to the changing needs of a growing application.
Start with the scaling course if you can write basic SQL and want to understand when architecture changes become necessary. Follow the fictional product through the lessons instead of jumping straight to sharding.
Instructor[2]A PlanetScale engineer covers isolation, sharding, back pressure and decoupling, then shows agents designing a Vitess sharding plan from a VSchema file. Traffic Control budgets and schema branching limit the damage from agent traffic surges.
Catalog workOriginal source- Database Transactionsplanetscale.com
An interactive introduction to atomic changes and concurrent database sessions.
Author[3]