Data Management in the Cloud : Limitations and Opportunities

Abstract

Recently the cloud computing paradigm has been receiving significant excitement and attention in the media and blogosphere. To some, cloud computing seems to be little more than a marketing umbrella, encompassing topics such as distributed computing, grid computing, utility computing, and software- as-a-service, that have already received significant research focus and commercial implementation. Nonetheless, there exist an increasing number of large companies that are offering cloud computing infrastructure products and services that do not entirely resemble the visions of these individual compo- nent topics. In this article we discuss the limitations and opportunities of deploying data management issues on these emerging cloud computing platforms (e.g., Amazon Web Services). We speculate that large scale data analysis tasks, decision support systems, and application specific data marts are more likely to take advantage of cloud computing platforms than operational, transactional database systems (at least initially). We present a list of features that a DBMS designed for large scale data analysis tasks running on an Amazon-style offering should contain. We then discuss some currently available open source and commercial database options that can be used to perform such analysis tasks, and conclude that none of these options, as presently architected, match the requisite features. We thus express the need for a new DBMS, designed specifically for cloud computing environments. 1