Leveraging 24/7 Availability and Performance for Distributed Real-Time Data Warehouses

Real-time Data Warehouses (DWs) must be able to deal with continuous updates while ensuring 24/7 availability. To improve their performance, distributing data using round-robin algorithms on clusters of shared-nothing machines is normally used. This paper proposes a solution for distributed DW databases that ensures its continuous availability and deals with frequent data loading requirements, while adding small performance overhead. We use a data striping and replication architecture to distribute portions of each fact table among pairs of slave nodes, where each slave node is an exact replica of its partner. This allows balancing query execution and replacing any defective node, ensuring the system´s continuous availability. The size of each portion in a given node depends on its individual features, namely performance benchmark measures and dedicated database RAM. The estimated cost for executing each query workload in each slave node is also used for balancing query performance. We include experiments using the TPC-H decision support benchmark to evaluate the scalability of the proposed solution and show that it outperforms standard round-robin distributed DW setups.