A Survey of Cloud Database Systems

Date: Friday, October 13, 2023, 2:15 – 3:15pm

Location: 307 James Love Building

Abstract: In this talk, I will first introduce traditional (non-cloud) parallel and distributed database systems. Concepts like SQL and NoSQL systems, data replication, distributed and parallel query processing, and data recovery after different types of failures will be covered. Then, I will discuss how the emergence of the (public) cloud has introduced new requirements on parallel and distributed database systems, and how such requirements have necessitated fundamental changes to the architectures of such systems. One of the most important cloud-related developments is the emergence of the concept of storage disaggregation which allows for dynamic allocation and deallocation of compute nodes for query processing. Exploitation of AI technologies to make the management of such systems more automated is another trend. I will also argue that ideas from shared disks on-premises DBMSs need to be adopted and adapted in the cloud environment to support increased capacity for read-write transactions, and to improve availability during system upgrades and compute node failures.
I will illustrate the related developments by discussing some of the details of systems like Alibaba POLARDB, Microsoft Azure SQL DB, Microsoft Socrates, Azure Synapse POLARIS, Google Spanner, Google AlloyDB, CockroachDB, Amazon Aurora and Snowflake.

Links and comments: Dr. C. Mohan, National Academy of Engineering (NAE) member, is currently a Distinguished Professor of Science at Hong Kong Baptist University, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, and a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of Digital University Kerala. He retired in June 2020 from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was an IBM researcher for 38.5 years in the database, blockchain, AI and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM (1997-2020), ACM (2002-) and IEEE (2002-) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist (2006-2009). In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and numerous IBM awards, Mohan was elected to the United States and Indian National Academies of Engineering (2009), and named an IBM Master Inventor (1997).