RAIDb: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Databases

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the concept of Redundant Array of Inexpensive Databases (RAIDb). RAIDb is to databases what RAID is to disks. RAIDb aims at providing better performance and fault tolerance than a single database, at low cost, by combining multiple database instances into an array of databases. Like RAID, we define and compare different RAIDb levels that provide various cost/performance/fault tolerance tradeoffs. We present a Java implementation of RAIDb called Clustered JDBC or C-JDBC. C-JDBC achieves both database performance scalability and high availability at the middleware level without changing existing applications nor database engines. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.