DIDERO-PC (DIverse DatabasE ReplicatiOn-Performance Comparison)

Staff and Funding

Principal Investigator: Dr Vladimir Stankovic

Contact People: Dr Vladimir Stankovic

Funding for City University: £97,386.00

Total Funding: £121,733.00

Funding Source: EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) First Grant Scheme

Duration: 1 year starting 1 February 2013

Project Description

Diverse database replication protocols have a potential of providing higher dependability assurance than traditional approaches that replicate DBMSs (Database Management Systems) from the same vendor (research from the Centre for Software Reliability has contributed significantly to that finding). However, besides achieving appropriate dependability level, system designers and other DBMS stakeholders are interested in the performance characteristics offered by different solutions. For many applications performance is, in fact, the dominant criterion in the selection process.

This project is about experimental evaluation of diverse database replication protocols. It aims at comparing the performance of several academic database replication protocols, which protect against non-crash failures and are based on use of diverse, i.e. different by design, DBMSs. These DBMSs are developed by different vendors, and can be either commercial (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle), or open-source products (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL). The experimental evaluation will be conducted using two approaches: a model-based approach and a direct experimentation on a testbed with "real" systems.

We developed a stochastic model for performance evaluation of database replication protocols, paying particular attention to: i) empirical validation of a number of assumptions used in the stochastic model, and ii) empirical validation of model accuracy for a chosen replication protocol. Our implementation of the model is based on Stochastic Activity Networks (SAN), extended by bespoke code. The model may reduce the cost of performance evaluation in comparison with empirical measurements, while keeping the accuracy of the assessment to an acceptable level. A paper on this topic has been accepted for the Twelfth International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems - QEST2015. The implementation of the model is available here, and the paper is available here.

CSR Personnel: Dr Peter Popov, Dr Kizito Salako and Dr Vladimir Stankovic

We welcome your feedback, please email any comments/suggestions to: Vladimir Stankovic