When Database Systems Meet the Grid

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how integrating database systems with Grid technologies can significantly improve the performance of data-intensive applications, exemplified by a faster astronomical database query implementation.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach of combining database systems with Grid computing, achieving an order of magnitude speedup over previous implementations.

Findings

SQL-based implementation is faster than Tcl-C-file-based version

Grid applications benefit from database system integration

Significant performance improvements in data-intensive tasks

Abstract

We illustrate the benefits of combining database systems and Grid technologies for data-intensive applications. Using a cluster of SQL servers, we reimplemented an existing Grid application that finds galaxy clusters in a large astronomical database. The SQL implementation runs an order of magnitude faster than the earlier Tcl-C-file-based implementation. We discuss why and how Grid applications can take advantage of database systems.