DERBY: a memory management system for distributed main memory databases

This paper describes a main memory data storage system for a distributed system of heterogeneous general purpose workstations. We show that distributed main memory storage managers are qualitatively different from distributed disk-based storage managers. Specifically, we show that load balancing, which is crucial to disk-based systems, has little effect on the performance of a memory-based system. On the other hand, we show that saturation prevention in cases where the server exceeds its memory capacity or becomes overloaded is crucial to smooth performance. Finally, we show that distributed memory-based storage results in performance more than one order of magnitude better than their disk-based counterparts