Understanding the Performance of Distributed Database Management Systems in Volatile Environments

Abstract

Cloud computing provides scalability and elasticity mechanisms on resource level and has become the preferred operational model for many applications. These, in turn, are based on distributed architectures trusting that this leads to scalability and elasticity and hence, good performance. Many applications rely on one or multiple database management systems (DBMS) as storage backends in order to manage their persistent state. Hence, the selection of a DBMS for a specific use case is crucial for performance and other non-functional properties. Yet, the choice is cumbersome due to the large number of available systems and the many impact factors ranging from the size of virtual resources, the type of the DBMS, and its architecture and scaling factor. In this paper, we summarise our experiences with performance evaluation for cloud-hosted DBMS in order to find well-suited configurations for specific use cases. We demonstrate that the overall performance of a distributed DBMS depends on three major domains (workload, cloud environment, and DBMS) with various parameters for each dimension.