203 research outputs found
Dynamic Physiological Partitioning on a Shared-nothing Database Cluster
Traditional DBMS servers are usually over-provisioned for most of their daily
workloads and, because they do not show good-enough energy proportionality,
waste a lot of energy while underutilized. A cluster of small (wimpy) servers,
where its size can be dynamically adjusted to the current workload, offers
better energy characteristics for these workloads. Yet, data migration,
necessary to balance utilization among the nodes, is a non-trivial and
time-consuming task that may consume the energy saved. For this reason, a
sophisticated and easy to adjust partitioning scheme fostering dynamic
reorganization is needed. In this paper, we adapt a technique originally
created for SMP systems, called physiological partitioning, to distribute data
among nodes, that allows to easily repartition data without interrupting
transactions. We dynamically partition DB tables based on the nodes'
utilization and given energy constraints and compare our approach with physical
partitioning and logical partitioning methods. To quantify possible energy
saving and its conceivable drawback on query runtimes, we evaluate our
implementation on an experimental cluster and compare the results w.r.t.
performance and energy consumption. Depending on the workload, we can
substantially save energy without sacrificing too much performance
Middleware-based Database Replication: The Gaps between Theory and Practice
The need for high availability and performance in data management systems has
been fueling a long running interest in database replication from both academia
and industry. However, academic groups often attack replication problems in
isolation, overlooking the need for completeness in their solutions, while
commercial teams take a holistic approach that often misses opportunities for
fundamental innovation. This has created over time a gap between academic
research and industrial practice.
This paper aims to characterize the gap along three axes: performance,
availability, and administration. We build on our own experience developing and
deploying replication systems in commercial and academic settings, as well as
on a large body of prior related work. We sift through representative examples
from the last decade of open-source, academic, and commercial database
replication systems and combine this material with case studies from real
systems deployed at Fortune 500 customers. We propose two agendas, one for
academic research and one for industrial R&D, which we believe can bridge the
gap within 5-10 years. This way, we hope to both motivate and help researchers
in making the theory and practice of middleware-based database replication more
relevant to each other.Comment: 14 pages. Appears in Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data, Vancouver, Canada, June 200
The Homeostasis Protocol: Avoiding Transaction Coordination Through Program Analysis
Datastores today rely on distribution and replication to achieve improved
performance and fault-tolerance. But correctness of many applications depends
on strong consistency properties - something that can impose substantial
overheads, since it requires coordinating the behavior of multiple nodes. This
paper describes a new approach to achieving strong consistency in distributed
systems while minimizing communication between nodes. The key insight is to
allow the state of the system to be inconsistent during execution, as long as
this inconsistency is bounded and does not affect transaction correctness. In
contrast to previous work, our approach uses program analysis to extract
semantic information about permissible levels of inconsistency and is fully
automated. We then employ a novel homeostasis protocol to allow sites to
operate independently, without communicating, as long as any inconsistency is
governed by appropriate treaties between the nodes. We discuss mechanisms for
optimizing treaties based on workload characteristics to minimize
communication, as well as a prototype implementation and experiments that
demonstrate the benefits of our approach on common transactional benchmarks
Instant restore after a media failure
Media failures usually leave database systems unavailable for several hours
until recovery is complete, especially in applications with large devices and
high transaction volume. Previous work introduced a technique called
single-pass restore, which increases restore bandwidth and thus substantially
decreases time to repair. Instant restore goes further as it permits read/write
access to any data on a device undergoing restore--even data not yet
restored--by restoring individual data segments on demand. Thus, the restore
process is guided primarily by the needs of applications, and the observed mean
time to repair is effectively reduced from several hours to a few seconds.
This paper presents an implementation and evaluation of instant restore. The
technique is incrementally implemented on a system starting with the
traditional ARIES design for logging and recovery. Experiments show that the
transaction latency perceived after a media failure can be cut down to less
than a second and that the overhead imposed by the technique on normal
processing is minimal. The net effect is that a few "nines" of availability are
added to the system using simple and low-overhead software techniques
A Business Continuity Solution for Telecommunications Billing Systems
The billing system is a critical component in a Telecommunications service provider\u27s suite of business support systems - without the billing system the provider cannot invoice their customers for services provided and therefore cannot generate revenue. Typically billing systems are hosted on a single large Unix/Oracle system located in the company\u27s data centre. Modern Unix servers with their redundant components and hot swap parts are highly resilient and can provide levels of availability when correctly installed in properly managed data centre with uninterruptible power supplies, cooling etc. High Availability clustering through the use of HP MC/ServiceGuard, Sun Cluster, IBM HACMP (High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing) or Oracle Clusterware/RAC (Real Application clusters) can bring this level of availability even higher. This approach however can only protect against the failure of a single server or component of the system, it cannot protect against the loss of an entire data centre in the event of a disaster such as a fire, flood or earthquake. In order to protect against such disasters it is necessary to provide some form of backup system on a site sufficiently remote from the primary site so that it would not be affected by any disaster, which might befall the primary site. This paper proposes a cost effective business continuity solution to protect a Telecommunications Billing system from the effects of unplanned downtime due to server or site outages. It is aimed at the smaller scale tier 2 and tier 3 providers such as Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and startup Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) who are unlikely to have large established IT systems with business continuity features and for whom cost effectiveness is a key concern when implementing IT systems
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