The evolving landscape of data management in the cloud

Abstract

Scalable database management systems (DBMSs) are a critical part of the cloud infrastructure and play an important role in ensuring the smooth transition of applications from the classical enterprise infrastructures to next generation cloud infrastructures. Though scalable data management on distributed platforms has been a vision for more than three decades and much research has focused on large scale data management in traditional enterprise setting, cloud computing brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to ensure the success of data management solutions in the cloud environment that is inherently distributed. This article presents an organised picture of the challenges faced by application developers and DBMS designers in developing and deploying internet scale applications. Our background study encompasses systems for supporting update heavy applications and focuses on providing an in-depth analysis of such systems. We crystallise the design choices made by some successful large scale database management systems, analyse the application demands and access patterns and how the scalable database management systems have evolved to meet such requirements. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.