Navigation Server: a highly parallel DBMS on open systems

Abstract

Navigation Server was jointly developed to provide a highly scalable, high-performance parallel database server in the industry. By combining ATandT's experience in massively parallel systems, such as Teradata system, with Sybase's industry-leading open, client/server DBMS, Navigation Server was developed with some specific design objectives: Scalability. Minimizing interference by minimizing resource sharing among the concurrent processes, the shared-nothing architecture has, as of today, emerged as the architecture of choice for highly scalable parallel systems. Navigation Server adopts the shared-nothing parallel architecture to allow parallelized queries, updates, load, backup, and other utilities on a partitioned database. Portability Built on top of Sybase's open system products, Navigation Server is portable to Unix-based parallel machines. Further the shared-nothing software architecture demands minimal changes when porting Navigation Server to various parallel platforms ranging from symmetric multi-processing, clustered, to massively parallel processing systems. Availability. For a parallel system with many nodes, it may be often to see some hardware component failure. To achieve high availability, Navigation Server implements a hierarchical monitoring scheme to monitor all the running processes. With the monitoring frequency configurable by users, a process will be restarted automatically on an alternate node once a failure is detected. Usability. Navigation Server appears as a single Sybase SQL server to end users. Besides, it provides Sybase SQL Server two management tools: Configurator and Navigation Server Manager. The Configurator analyzes customers' workload, monitors system performance, and recommends configurations for optimal performance and resource utilization. The Navigation Server Manager provides graphical utilities to administer the system simply and efficiently. >