A Hybrid Shared-Nothing/Shared-Data Storage Architecture for Large Scale Databases

Shared-nothing and shared-disk are two widely-used storage architectures in current parallel database systems, and each of them has its own merits for different query patterns. However, there is no much effort in investigating the integration of these two architectures and exploiting their merits together. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid shared-nothing/shared-data storage scheme for large-scale databases, to leverage the benefits of both shared-nothing and shared-disk architectures. We adopt a shared-nothing architecture as the hardware layer and leverage a parallel file system as the storage layer. The proposed hybrid storage scheme can provide a high degree of parallelism in both I/O and computing, like that in a shared-nothing system. In the meantime, it can achieve convenient and high-speed data sharing across multiple database nodes, like that in a shared-disk system. The hybrid scheme is more appropriate for large-scale and data-intensive applications than each of the two individual types of systems.