MIT OpenCourseWare, 6.830 Database Systems, Fall 2010, Prof. Carlo Curino and Prof. Michael Stonebraker. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Reorganized into modules by Sequence 106. No lecture videos were published for this course; each session is notes plus readings. Source · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Module 6 · Column stores, distributed and parallel databases · Activity 23 of 32
Lecture 17: Parallel databases
Lecture notes · Carlo Curino
Readings and discussion questions
Read:
Dewitt, David, and Jim Gray. “Parallel Database Systems: The Future of High Performance Database Processing.” Communications of the ACM 35, no. 6 (1992): 85-98. In the Red Book.
The Dewitt and Gray paper is a high level summary of database architectures for parallelism, illustrating some of the techniques that can be used to exploit the availability of multiple processors in a database system.
Questions to consider:
- What’s the difference between a parallel and a distributed database? What issues are different in one architecture versus the other? In what ways are the two architectures alike?
- Why do Dewitt and Gray advocate a shared nothing architecture?
- In what ways must existing database architectures be modified to support multi-processor environments? What new data layout issues are introduced? What new query processing challenges must be addressed?
Assigned by MIT for this session; links go to the papers where MIT linked them. Books: Readings in Database Systems (the Red Book, 4th ed.) and Ramakrishnan & Gehrke.