Segmentation in a Distributed Real-Time Main-Memory Database

Abstract: To achieve better scalability, a fully replicated, distributed, main-memory database is divided into subparts, called segments. Segments may have individual degrees of redundancy and other properties that can be used for replication control. Segmentation is examined for the opportunity of decreasing replication effort, lower memory requirements and decrease node recovery times. Typical usage scenarios are distributed databases with many nodes where only a small number of the nodes share information. We present a framework for virtual full replication that implements segments with scheduled replication of updates between sharing nodes. Selective replication control needs information about the application semantics that is specified using segment properties, which includes consistency classes and other properties. We define a syntax for specifying the application semantics and segment properties for the segmented database. In particular, properties of segments that are subject to hard real-time constraints must be specified. We also analyze the potential improvements for such an architecture.