Parallel OLAP with the Sidera server

Abstract

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become a primary component of today's pervasive Decision Support systems. As the underlying databases grow into the multi-terabyte range, however, single CPU OLAP servers are being stretched beyond their limits. In this paper, we present a comprehensive model for a fully parallelized OLAP server. Our multi-node platform actually consists of a series of largely independent sibling servers that are "glued" together with a lightweight MPI-based Parallel Service Interface (PSI). Physically, we target the commodity-oriented, "shared nothing" Linux cluster, an architecture that provides an extremely cost effective alternative to the "shared everything" commercial platforms often used in high-end database environments. Experimental results demonstrate both the viability and robustness of the design. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.