A performance comparison of multi-micro and mainframe database architectures

• Published in: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
• Main Authors: Heidelberger, Philip, Lakshmi, Seetha
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 1987
• Subjects: DeWitt; Wilkinson; Terranova
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1145/29904.29906; https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/29904.29906

Database machine architectures consisting of multiple microprocessors or mini-computers are attracting wide attention. There have been several proposals and prototypes (see, e.g., DeWitt, Gerber, Graefe, Heytens, Kumar and Muralikrishna (1986), Fishman, Lai and Wilkinson (1984), Hsiao (1983), or the 1983 and 1985 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Database Machines ). There is also a commercially available system based on multiple microprocessors (Teradata (1984)). With these architectures it is possible to exploit parallelism at three levels: within a single query, within a single transaction, and by simultaneously executing multiple independent transactions. The rationale behind these multiple microprocessor architectures is primarily to take advantage of the potential lower cost per MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second, a measure of processing power) of microprocessors as opposed to mainframes. In addition, database machines may offer incremental capacity growth as well as improved performance for large queries by exploiting parallelism within a single query. However, it is not clear if database machines made of multiple microprocessors indeed have any cost/performance advantage over a more conventional mainframe based database management systems. Several papers on the performance analysis of database machines can be found in the literature (e.g., Salza, Terranova and Velardi (1983) or Bit and Hartman (1985)). Most of these studies have focused on determining the execution time of a single query in a particular database machine architecture. Few studies have dealt with the response time of single queries in a multi-user environment. We are not aware of any papers that systematically study the performance trade-offs between a multi-microprocessor database machine and a large mainframe system. This paper presents such a systematic study. We examine a hypothetical database machine that uses standard microprocessors and disks; database machines that use special purpose hardware are not considered ...