A shared-nothing architecture is state-of-the-art for deploying a distributed analytical in-memory database management system: it preserves the in-memory performance advantage by processing data locally on each node but is difficult to scale out. Modern switched fabric communication links such as InfiniBand narrow the performance gap between local and remote DRAM data access to a single order of magnitude. Based on these premises, we introduce a distributed in-memory database architecture that separates the query execution engine and data access: this enables a) the usage of a large-scale DRAM-based storage system such as Stanford's RAMCloud and b) the push-down of bandwidth-intensive database operators into the storage system. We address the resulting challenges such as finding the optimal operator execution strategy and partitioning scheme. We demonstrate that such an architecture delivers both: the elasticity of a shared-storage approach and the performance characteristics of operating on local DRAM.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.