Highly Available Database Management Systems

Abstract

In the Internet age, real-time Web-based services are becoming more pervasive every day. They span virtually all business and government sectors, and typically have a large number of users. Many such services require continuous operation, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Any extended disruption in services, including both planned and unplanned downtime, can result in significant financial loss and negative social effects. Consequently, the systems providing these services must be made highly available. A Web-based service is typically powered by a multi-tier system, consisting of Web servers, application servers, and database management systems, running in a server farm environment. The Web servers handle direct Web traffic and pass requests that need further processing to the application servers. The application servers process the requests according to the predefined business logic. The database management systems store and manage all mission-critical data and application states so that the Web servers and application servers can be programmed as stateless servers. (Some application servers may cache information, or keep session state. However, the loss of such state may reduce performance temporarily or may be slightly annoying to the affected user, but not critical.) This design is driven by the demand for high scalability (to support a large number of users) and high availability (to provide services all the time). If the number of users has increased, more Web servers and application servers can be added dynamically. If a Web server or an application server fails, the next request can be routed to another server for processing. Inevitably, this design increases the burden and importance of the database management systems. However, this is not done without good reason. Web applications often need to access and generate a huge amount of data on requests from a large number of users. A database management system can store and manage the data in a well-organized and structured way (often using the relational model). It also provides highly efficient concurrency control on accesses to shared data. While it is relatively straightforward to ensure high availability for Web servers and application servers by simply running multiple copies in the stateless design, it is not so for a database management system, which in general has abundant state. The subject of highly available database systems has been studied for more than two decades, and there exist many alternative solutions (Agrawal, El Abbadi, & Steinke, 1997; Kemme, & Alonso, 2000; Patino-Martinez, Jimenez- Peris, Kemme, & Alonso, 2005). In this article, we provide an overview of two of the most popular database high availability strategies, namely database replication and database clustering. The emphasis is given to those that have been adopted and implemented by major database management systems (Davies & Fisk, 2006; Ault & Tumma, 2003).