Schism: a Workload-Driven Approach to Database Replication and Partitioning

We present Schism, a novel workload-aware approach for database partitioning and replication designed to improve scalability of sharednothing distributed databases. Because distributed transactions are expensive in OLTP settings (a fact we demonstrate through a series of experiments), our partitioner attempts to minimize the number of distributed transactions, while producing balanced partitions. Schism consists of two phases: i) a workload-driven, graph-based replication/partitioning phase and ii) an explanation and validation phase. The first phase creates a graph with a node per tuple (or group of tuples) and edges between nodes accessed by the same transaction, and then uses a graph partitioner to split the graph into k balanced partitions that minimize the number of cross-partition transactions. The second phase exploits machine learning techniques to find a predicate-based explanation of the partitioning strategy (i.e., a set of range predicates that represent the same replicati...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Carlo Curino, Yang Zhang, Evan P. C. Jones, Samuel Madden
• Keywords: Databases, Partitioner, PVLDB 2010, Social Network