Relational Cloud: The Case for a Database Service

Abstract

In this paper, we make the case for â databases as a serviceâ (DaaS), with two target scenarios in mind: (i) consolidation of data management functionality for large organizations and (ii) outsourcing data management to a cloud-based service provider for small/medium organizations. We analyze the many challenges to be faced, and discuss the design of a database service we are building, called Relational Cloud. The system has been designed from scratch and combines many recent advances and novel solutions. The prototype we present exploits multiple dedicated storage engines, provides high-availability via transparent replication, supports automatic workload partitioning and live data migration, and provides serializable distributed transactions. While the system is still under active development, we are able to present promising initial results that showcase the key features of our system. The tests are based on TPC benchmarks and real-world data from epinions.com, and show our partitioning, scalability and balancing capabilities.