Back to results

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Elastic database systems

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Distributed on-line transaction processing (OLTP) database management systems (DBMSs) are a critical part of the operation of large enterprises. These systems often serve time-varying workloads due to daily, weekly or seasonal fluctuations in load, or because of rapid growth in demand due to a company's business success. In addition, many OLTP workloads are heavily skewed to "hot" tuples or ranges of tuples. For example, the majority of NYSE volume involves only 40 stocks. To manage such fluctuations, many companies currently provision database servers for peak demand. This approach is wasteful and not resilient to extreme skew or large workload spikes. To be both efficient and resilient, a distributed OLTP DBMS must be elastic; that is, it must be able to expand and contract its cluster of servers as demand fluctuates, and dynamically balance load as hot tuples vary over time. This thesis presents two elastic OLTP DBMSs, called E-Store and P-Store, which demonstrate the benefits of elasticity for distributed OLTP DBMSs on different types of workloads. E-Store automatically scales the database cluster in response to demand spikes, periodic events, and gradual changes in an application's workload, but it is particularly well-suited for managing hot spots. In contrast to traditional single-tier hash and range partitioning strategies, E-Store manages hot spots through a two-tier data placement strategy: cold data is distributed in large chunks, while smaller ranges of hot tuples are assigned explicitly to individual nodes. P-Store is an elastic OLTP DBMS that is designed for a subset of OLTP applications in which load varies predictably. For these applications, P-Store performs better than reactive systems like E-Store, because P-Store uses predictive modeling to reconfigure the system in advance of predicted load changes. The experimental evaluation shows the efficacy of the two systems under variations in load across a cluster of machines. Compared to single-tier approaches, E-Store improves throughput by up to 130% while reducing latency by 80%. On a predictable workload, P-Store outperforms a purely reactive system by causing 72% fewer latency violations, and achieves performance comparable to static allocation for peak demand while using 50% fewer servers.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Taft, Rebecca (Rebecca Yale)
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Michael R. Stonebraker.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113989
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113989

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Taft, Rebecca (Rebecca Yale). Elastic database systems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113989