Chapter 20: Database System Architectures

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Outline

 Centralized Database Systems

 Server System Architectures
 Parallel Systems
 Distributed Systems
 Network Types

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 Centralized Database Systems

 Run on a single computer system

 Single-user system
• Embedded databases
 Multi-user systems also known as server systems.
• Service requests received from client systems
• Multi-core systems with coarse-grained parallelism
 Typically a few to tens of processor cores
 In contrast, fine-grained parallelism uses very large number of
computers

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 Server System Architecture

 Server systems can be broadly categorized into two kinds:

• transaction servers
 Widely used in relational database systems, and
• data servers
 Parallel data servers used to implement high-performance
transaction processing systems

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 Transaction Servers

 Also called query server systems or SQL server systems

• Clients send requests to the server
• Transactions are executed at the server
• Results are shipped back to the client.
 Requests are specified in SQL, and communicated to the server through a
remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism.
 Transactional RPC allows many RPC calls to form a transaction.
 Applications typically use ODBC/JDBC APIs to communicate with
transaction servers

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 Transaction System Processes (Cont.)

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 Transaction Server Process Structure

 A typical transaction server consists of multiple processes accessing data

in shared memory
 Shared memory contains shared data
• Buffer pool
• Lock table
• Log buffer
• Cached query plans (reused if same query submitted again)
 All database processes can access shared memory
 Server processes
• These receive user queries (transactions), execute them and send
results back
• Processes may be multithreaded, allowing a single process to
execute several user queries concurrently
• Typically multiple multithreaded server processes

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 Transaction Server Processes (Cont.)

 Database writer process

• Output modified buffer blocks to disks continually
 Log writer process
• Server processes simply add log records to log record buffer
• Log writer process outputs log records to stable storage.
 Checkpoint process
• Performs periodic checkpoints
 Process monitor process
• Monitors other processes, and takes recovery actions if any of the other
processes fail
 E.g. aborting any transactions being executed by a server process
and restarting it

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 Transaction System Processes (Cont.)

 Lock manager process

• To avoid overhead of interprocess communication for lock request/grant,
each database process operates directly on the lock table
 instead of sending requests to lock manager process
• Lock manager process still used for deadlock detection
 To ensure that no two processes are accessing the same data structure at
the same time, databases systems implement mutual exclusion using
either
• Atomic instructions
 Test-And-Set
 Compare-And-Swap (CAS)
• Operating system semaphores
 Higher overhead than atomic instructions

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 Atomic Instructions

 Test-And-Set(M)
• Memory location M, initially 0
• Test-and-set(M) sets M to 1, and returns old value of M
 Return value 0 indicates process has acquired the mutex
 Return value 1 indicates someone is already holding the mutex
• Must try again later
 Release of mutex done by setting M = 0
 Compare-and-swap(M, V1, V2)
• Atomically do following
 If M = V1, set M = V2 and return success
 Else return failure
• With M = 0 initially, CAS(M, 0, 1) equivalent to test-and-set(M)
• Can use CAS(M, 0, id) where id = thread-id or process-id to record
who has the mutex

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 Data Servers/Data Storage Systems

 Data items are shipped to clients where processing is performed

 Updated data items written back to server
 Earlier generation of data servers would operated in units of data items,
or pages containing multiple data items
 Current generation data servers (also called data storage systems) only
work in units of data items
• Commonly used data item formats include JSON, XML, or just
uninterpreted binary strings

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 Data Servers/Storage Systems (Cont.)

 Prefetching
• Prefetch items that may be used soon
 Data caching
• Cache coherence
 Lock caching
• Locks can be cached by client across transactions
• Locks can be called back by the server
 Adaptive lock granularity
• Lock granularity escalation
 switch from finer granularity (e.g. tuple) lock to coarser
• Lock granularity de-escalation
 Start with coarse granularity to reduve overheads, switch to finer
granularity in case of more concurrency conflict at server
 Details in book

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 Data Servers (Cont.)

 Data Caching
• Data can be cached at client even in between transactions
• But check that data is up-to-date before it is used (cache coherency)
• Check can be done when requesting lock on data item
 Lock Caching
• Locks can be retained by client system even in between transactions
• Transactions can acquire cached locks locally, without contacting server
• Server calls back locks from clients when it receives conflicting lock
request. Client returns lock once no local transaction is using it.
 Similar to lock callback on prefetch, but across transactions.

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 Parallel Systems

 Parallel database systems consist of multiple processors and multiple disks

connected by a fast interconnection network.
 Motivation: handle workloads beyond what a single computer system can
handle
 High performance transaction processing
• E.g. handling user requests at web-scale
 Decision support on very large amounts of data
• E.g. data gathered by large web sites/apps

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 Parallel Systems (Cont.)

 A coarse-grain parallel machine consists of a small number of powerful

processors
 A massively parallel or fine grain parallel machine utilizes thousands of
smaller processors.
• Typically hosted in a data center
 Two main performance measures:
• throughput --- the number of tasks that can be completed in a given
time interval
• response time --- the amount of time it takes to complete a single task
from the time it is submitted

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 Speed-Up and Scale-Up

 Speedup: a fixed-sized problem executing on a small system is given to a

system which is N-times larger.
• Measured by:
speedup = small system elapsed time
large system elapsed time
• Speedup is linear if equation equals N.
 Scaleup: increase the size of both the problem and the system
• N-times larger system used to perform N-times larger job
• Measured by:
scaleup = small system small problem elapsed time
big system big problem elapsed time
• Scale up is linear if equation equals 1.

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 Speedup

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 Scaleup

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 Batch and Transaction Scaleup

 Batch scaleup:
• A single large job; typical of most decision support queries and
scientific simulation.
• Use an N-times larger computer on N-times larger problem.
 Transaction scaleup:
• Numerous small queries submitted by independent users to a shared
database; typical transaction processing and timesharing systems.
• N-times as many users submitting requests (hence, N-times as many
requests) to an N-times larger database, on an N-times larger
computer.
• Well-suited to parallel execution.

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 Factors Limiting Speedup and Scaleup

Speedup and scaleup are often sublinear due to:

 Startup/sequential costs: Cost of starting up multiple processes, and
sequential computation before/after parallel computation
• May dominate computation time, if the degree of parallelism is high
• Suppose p fraction of computation is sequential
• Amdahl’s law: speedup limited to: 1 / [(1-p)+(p/n)]
• Gustafson’s law: scaleup limited to: 1 / [n(1-p)+p]
 Interference: Processes accessing shared resources (e.g.,system bus,
disks, or locks) compete with each other, thus spending time waiting on
other processes, rather than performing useful work.
 Skew: Increasing the degree of parallelism increases the variance in
service times of parallely executing tasks. Overall execution time
determined by slowest of parallely executing tasks.

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 Interconnection Network Architectures

 Bus. System components send data on and receive data from a single
communication bus;
• Does not scale well with increasing parallelism.
 Mesh. Components are arranged as nodes in a grid, and each component
is connected to all adjacent components
• Communication links grow with growing number of components, and so
scales better.
• But may require 2n hops to send message to a node (or n with
wraparound connections at edge of grid).
 Hypercube. Components are numbered in binary; components are
connected to one another if their binary representations differ in exactly one
bit.
• n components are connected to log(n) other components and can reach
each other via at most log(n) links; reduces communication delays.
 Tree-like Topology. Widely used in data centers today

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 Interconnection Architectures

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 Interconnection Network Architectures
 Tree-like or Fat-Tree Topology: widely used in data centers today
• Top of rack switch for approx 40 machines in rack
• Each top of rack switch connected to multiple aggregation switches.
• Aggregation switches connect to multiple core switches.
 Data center fabric

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 Network Technologies

 Ethernet
• 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps common, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps are available
at higher cost
 Fiber Channel
• 32-138 Gbps available
 Infiniband
• a very-low-latency networking technology
 0.5 to 0.7 microseconds, compared to a few microseconds for
optimized ethernet

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 Parallel Database Architectures

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 Shared Memory

 Processors (or processor cores) and disks

have access to a common memory
• Via a bus in earlier days, through an
interconnection network today
 Extremely efficient communication between
processors
 Downside: shared-memory architecture is
not scalable beyond 64 to 128 processor
cores
• Memory interconnection network
becomes a bottleneck

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 Modern Shared Memory Architecture

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 Cache Levels

 Cache line: typically 64 bytes in today’s processors

 Cache levels within a single multi-core processor

 Shared memory system can have multiple processors, each with its own
cache levels

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 Cache Coherency

 Cache coherency:
• Local cache may have out of date value
• Strong vs weak consistency models
• With weak consistency, need special instructions to ensure cache is up
to date
 Memory barrier instructions
• Store barrier (sfence)
 Instruction returns after forcing cached data to be written to memory
and invalidations sent to all caches
• Load barrier (lfence)
 Returns after ensuring all pending cache invalidations are
processed
• mfence instruction does both of above
 Locking code usually takes care of barrier instructions
• Lfence done after lock acquisition and sfence done before lock release

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 Shared Disk

 All processors can directly access all

disks via an interconnection network,
but the processors have private
memories.
• Architecture provides a degree of
fault-tolerance — if a processor
fails, the other processors can
take over its tasks
 the data of the failed
processor is resident on disks
that are accessible from all
processors.
 Downside: bottleneck now occurs at
interconnection to the disk subsystem.

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 Modern Shared Disk Architectures:
via Storage Area Network (SAN)

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 Shared Nothing

 Node consists of a processor,

memory, and one or more disks
 All communication via
interconnection network
 Can be scaled up to thousands of
processors without interference.
 Main drawback: cost of
communication and non-local disk
access; sending data involves
software interaction at both ends.

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 Hierarchical

 Combines characteristics of shared-memory, shared-disk, and shared-

nothing architectures.
• Top level is a shared-nothing architecture
 With each node of the system being a shared-memory system
• Alternatively, top level could be a shared-disk system
 With each node of the system being a shared-memory system

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 Shared-Memory Vs Shared-Nothing

 Shared-memory internally looks like shared-nothing!

• Each processor has direct access to its own memory, and indirect
(hardware level) access to rest of memory
• Also called non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA)
 Shared-nothing can be made to look like shared memory
• Reduce the complexity of programming such systems by distributed
virtual-memory abstraction
• Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides very low-latency
shared memory abstraction on shared-nothing systems
 Often implemented on top of infiniband due it its very-low-latency
• But careless programming can lead to performance issues

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 Distributed Systems

 Data spread over multiple machines (also referred to as sites or nodes).

 Local-area networks (LANs)
 Wide-area networks (WANs)
• Higher latency
site A site C

netw ork

communication
via network

site B

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 Distributed Databases

 Homogeneous distributed databases

• Same software/schema on all sites, data may be partitioned among
sites
• Goal: provide a view of a single database, hiding details of distribution
 Heterogeneous distributed databases
• Different software/schema on different sites
• Goal: integrate existing databases to provide useful functionality
 Differentiate between local transactions and global transactions
• A local transaction accesses data in the single site at which the
transaction was initiated.
• A global transaction either accesses data in a site different from the
one at which the transaction was initiated or accesses data in several
different sites.

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 Data Integration and Distributed Databases
 Data integration between multiple distributed databases
 Benefits:
• Sharing data – users at one site able to access the data residing at
some other sites.
• Autonomy – each site is able to retain a degree of control over data
stored locally.

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 Availability

 Network partitioning
 Availability of system
• If all nodes are required for system to function, failure of even one
node stops system functioning.
• Higher system availability through redundancy
 data can be replicated at remote sites, and system can function
even if a site fails.

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 Implementation Issues for Distributed
Databases
 Atomicity needed even for transactions that update data at multiple sites
 The two-phase commit protocol (2PC) is used to ensure atomicity
• Basic idea: each site executes transaction until just before commit, and
the leaves final decision to a coordinator
• Each site must follow decision of coordinator, even if there is a failure
while waiting for coordinators decision
 2PC is not always appropriate: other transaction models based on
persistent messaging, and workflows, are also used
 Distributed concurrency control (and deadlock detection) required
 Data items may be replicated to improve data availability
 Details of all above in Chapter 24

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 Cloud Based Services

 Cloud computing widely adopted today

• On-demand provisioning and elasticity
 ability to scale up at short notice and to release of unused
resources for use by others
 Infrastructure as a service
• Virtual machines/real machines
 Platform as a service
• Storage, databases, application server
 Software as a service
• Enterprise applications, emails, shared documents, etc,
 Potential drawbacks
• Security
• Network bandwidth

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 Cloud Service Models

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 Application Deployment Alternatives

Individual Machines Virtual Machines Containers

(e.g. VMWare, KVM, ..) (e.g. Docker)

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 Application Deployment Architectures

 Services
 Microservice Architecture
• Application uses a variety of services
• Service can add or remove instances as required
 Kubernetes supports containers, and microservices

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 End of Chapter 20

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Figure 17.11

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