ATOMIC CLUSTERING OPERATIONS FOR MANAGING A PARTITIONED CLUSTER ONLINE

摘要

A set of six atomic primitives are provided for a database management system that may be used in combination to provide all of the common features and functions of a clustered database, including data failover, auto-healing, and elastic scaling. These six atomic primitives include CREATE, DROP, DETACH, ATTACH, COPY, and PROMOTE. Of particular note, it is shown that by maintaining appropriate metadata, including the status of each instance of each partition in the cluster, the versatility and reliability of this set of primitives is sufficient to implement each of the aforementioned data failover, auto-healing, and elastic scaling functions with high efficiency using a minimal number of these primitives. Each primitive is atomic (such that the cluster clearly in one state or another) and online (a workload of reads and writes is uninterrupted while the primitive runs), and each primitive is scoped to a single partition of data, thereby enabling parallel processing.