Distributed relational database performance in Cloud Computing: an investigative study

摘要

Although the advancement of Cloud Computing (CC) has revolutionised the way in which computational resources are employed and managed, it has also introduced performance challenges for existing systems, such as Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS’). This research investigates the performance of RDBMS’ when dealing with large amounts of distributed data in a CC environment.This study employs a quantitative approach using positivist reductionist methodology. It conducts nine experiments on two different RDBMS’ (SQL Server and Oracle) deployed in CC. Also, this research does not employ any performance measurement tools that were not specifically developed for CC. Data analysis is carried out using two different approaches: (a) comparing the experiments’ statistics between the systems and (b) using SPSS software to look for statistical evidence. Furthermore, this study relies on secondary data that indicate distributed RDBMS’ generally perform better on n-tier architecture. The results provide evidence that RDBMS’ create and apply execution plans in a manner that does not fit CC architecture. Therefore, these systems do not fit well in a CC environment. Also, the results from this investigation demonstrate that the known issues of distributed RDBMS’ become worse in CC, indicating that RDBMS’ are not optimised to run on CC architecture.The results of this study show that the performance measures of RDBMS’ in CC are inconsistent, which indicates that is how the public, and shared infrastructure affect performance. This research shows that RDBMS’ in CC become network-bound in addition to being I/O bound. Therefore, it concludes that CC creates an environment that negatively impacts RDBMSs performance in comparison to n-tier architecture. The findings from this study indicate that the employment of the above-mentioned tools does not present a complete picture about the performance of RDBMS’ in CC. The results of this research imply there exists architectural issues with relational data model thus these issues are worth studying in the future. Further, this study implies that applying ACID creates a challenge for users who want to have a scalable relational database in a CC environment because RDBMS should wait for the response over shared cloud network. This thesis reports cases where serious performance issues were encountered and it recommends that the design and architecture of RDBMS’ should be altered so that these systems can fit CC environment.