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Table Of Contents
Pooling
Each SQLFire member manages its own disk store, and no disk contention exists between processes. Each
partition can manage its data on local disks.
If the application "write" load can be uniformly balanced across the cluster, the aggregate disk throughput is
equal to the disk transfer rate time the number of partitions, assuming a single disk per partition. Disk transfer
rates can be up to 100MB/sec on commodity machines today.
Avoiding Seeks
Random access on disk, which causes disk heads to seek for hundreds of concurrent thread, is probably the single
biggest reason why traditional databases do not scale. Average disk seek times today are still 2ms or higher.
SQLFire manages most (or all) of the data in cluster memory, and all reads are served without navigating through
BTree-based indexes and data les on disk. This is the case when data is persistent. Note, however, that in
overow-only mode, data les on disk are accessed as necessary.
Buffered Logging
When writes do occur, SQLFire simply logs the operations to disk in "append-only" oplog les. By appending,
SQLFire can continuously write to consecutive sectors on disk without requiring disk head movement. SQLFire
ushes writes to the OS buffer rather than 'fsync' all the way to disk. The writes are buffered by the IO subsystem
in the kernel, which allows the IO scheduler to merge and sort disk writes to achieve the highest possible disk
throughput. Write requests need not initiate any disk I/O until some time in the future.
Thus, from the perspective of a user application, write requests stream at much higher speeds, unencumbered
by the performance of the disk. Risk of data loss due to sudden failures at a hardware level are mitigated by
having multiple members writing in parallel to disk. In fact, it is assumed that hardware will fail, especially in
large clusters and data centers, and that software needs to take these failures into account. The SQLFire system
is designed to recover in parallel from disk and to guarantee data consistency when data copies on disk do not
vFabric SQLFire User's Guide82
Managing Your Data in vFabric SQLFire