Distributed Processing and Transaction Replication in MonetDB - Towards a Scalable Analytical Database System in the Cloud

Thanks to its flexibility (i.e. new computing jobs can be set up in minutes, without having to wait for hardware procurement) and elasticity (i.e. more or less resources can be allocated to instantly match the current workload), cloud computing has rapidly gained much interests from both academic and commercial users. Increasingly moving into the cloud is a clear trend in the software developments. To provide its users a fast in-memory optimised analytical database system with all the conveniences of the cloud environment, we embarked upon extending the open-source column store database MonetDB with new features to make it cloud-ready. In the paper, we elaborate the new distributed and replicated transaction features in MonetDB. The distributed query processing feature allows MonetDB to horizontally scale-out to multiple machines; while the transaction replication schemes increase the availability of the MonetDB database servers.