A Novel Approach to Improve Availability of Massive Database Systems (MDS)

Abstract

Because of the huge scale and numerous components, a massive database system’s availability has become a serious challenge. Many database replication technologies are used to increase the MTTF, but few are provided to decrease MTTR in massive database systems where the traditional backup methods are not feasible for expensive human cost. Based on analyzing the characteristics of the data in massive databases, we propose a novel approach called Detaching Read-Only (DRO) mechanism and its variation DRO+. It decreases MTTR through reducing the size of physically changing data in every database by detaching data on node granularity. The analysis and experiment results show that our approach can not only reduce MTTR by an order of magnitude, but also reduce the expensive human cost without extra hardware cost.