Parallel Architectures for Database Systems

Abstract

This chapter examines the impact of current technology on the design of special-purpose database machines (DBMs) and provides a survey of the DBMs that focuses on the adaptability of the designs to the current technology. The computer architectures fall into four groups—namely, single instruction stream-single data stream (SISD), single instruction stream-multiple data stream (SIMD), multiple instruction stream-single data stream (MISD), and multiple instruction stream-multiple data stream (MIMD). Database computer (DBC) uses two forms of parallelism: an entire cylinder is processed in parallel and the system performs queries in a pipeline fashion by separate units around two rings. The systems in high very large scale integration (VLSI)-compatible database machines are designed based on the constraints imposed by technology. In general, they are highly parallel with regular and simple architectures. The future database machine designers ought to concentrate on two important issues: (1) the investigation of the effect and benefit of a specialized database operating system on their DBM designs and (2) the optimization of the system throughput rather than improving the response time of a single request.