Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2010

Databases constitute a very important and essential part of today's business infrastructures. Nearly every organization has at least one business critical database, therefore solutions are needed that achieve highest availability, reliability and data consistency. Many solutions on the market provide these characteristics but they target big companies, so there is a lack of inexpensive, simple solutions that small organizations can afford.

 

In this thesis a solution is developed that fills this gap. Thus a high available, reliable, scalable, self healing system is presented which is designed as middleware software using a cluster of common proprietary and open source single server database management systems as underlying storage nodes. This heterogeneous database management system cluster uses virtual shared memory, which follows the space based computing paradigm, as central coordination and communication structure.

 

The thesis starts with a general discussion of databases, high availability solutions for databases and space based computing followed by a theoretical description of the Heterogeneous Clustered SQL - Database Management System (HCSQL), the solution designed in this project. This part explains the approach and architecture of HCSQL, furthermore use cases and the system description are presented. After this theoretical part a detailed description of the prototype implementation is provided. Finally a generalization of the approach used in HCSQL, parallel consistency checked operations, is discussed.