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Table of contents:

Building High-perfomance Object Oriented Databases

• The Problem
• High ingest rates
• High delete/archival rates
• Complex relationships
• Flexibility
• Performance Optimization
• Very Large Cardinalities
• A Solution
• Persistence
• The Hierarchical Solution
• The Relational Solution
• An Object-oriented approach to persistence
• Query/Retrieval
• Query by Attribute
• Query by Traversal
• Cache
• Concurrency
• Schema Control and Data Migration
• Transactions (Commit / Rollback)
• Single, Consistent View of Data
• A Practical Example
• Logical Schema
• Message Class
• Attachments and Relationships
• Sender, Recipients, CC Lists and Addresses
• Physical Data Placement
• Using Databases and Containers for Fast Archival and Deletes
• Using Databases and Containers for Fast Queries
• Using Databases, Containers and Range Lists for Parallel Queries
• Hardware Architecture Design and Sizing
• Objectivity/DB Terminology

Building High-perfomance Object Oriented Databases

Introduction: This paper describes building a high performance data repository system with Objectivity/DB. Specifically, this paper will address how to provide extremely high throughput (high ingest and delete rates) while simultaneously allowing many users to query the data and quickly receive results.

Overview: Since 1996, Objectivity/DB has been the platform for the largest publicly acknowledged database in the world at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California. The Babar system currently employs about 2000 CPUs in 100 servers to ingest and process approximately a Terabyte of data a day and as of December, 2003 has grown to over 800 Terabytes in online and near-online storage.

In June of 2003, Objectivity participated in a benchmarking activity with Silicon Graphics in which a sample application was proven to ingest well over a Terabyte of data an hour using a single Origin server with 32 processors. A separate 32-processor Origin server was used to simultaneously query the database using over 200 concurrent threads without any degrada-tion to the ingest performance.

The basic architecture of this system is shown in Figure 1, except that the query processors are shown as separate workstations. The details of this sample application and its specific requirements cannot be made public, since the benchmark was performed under non-disclosure agreements. We can, however, describe quantitatively how to design an Objectivity/DB system to achieve results that have been considered either out of reach or prohibitively expensive to attain.