POLAR - Parallel Object Oriented Database Servers

Project Dates: From April 1998 to March 2001

Sponsors: EPSRC

Parallelism has been widely exploited as a means of providing high-performance for database systems, and the commercial market for parallel database servers is probably already in excess of $1bn. However, almost all this work has focused upon the relational data model, and commercial systems tend to be expensive due to the use of custom designed components. This project seeks to address these limitations of existing parallel databases by: (1) designing and developing a parallel implementation of the ODMG industry standard for object-oriented databases, thereby making the performance benefits of parallel server technology available to applications that benefit from object-oriented data modelling; (2) supporting the ODMG database server on a low-cost parallel platform based on PCs connected though an ATM network; (3) porting the server to an ICL Goldrush MegaServer to allow performance comparisons to be made between the low-cost platform and a custom-built parallel machine. Many of the applications associated with object-oriented databases have stringent performance requirements, and research is required to support effective optimisation and parallel evaluation of queries over ODMG databases and to design server software that provides both high performance and scalability on top of commodity computing and network components.