architecture Designing a Real-Time Leaderboard: Why Sorted Sets Beat a SQL ORDER BY at Scale josedacruz, September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 TL;DR: A leaderboard looks like a simple feature — sort some scores, show the top N — but a plain SQL table falls over once you have millions of players updating scores in real time. The fix isn’t a bigger database, it’s a different data structure: a sorted set (like… Continue Reading