This is a guest post by Douglas Wilson, EMEA Field Application Engineer at Raima, based on insights from biulding their Raima Database Manager.

Scalability and Hardware

Scalability is the ability to maintain performance as demands on the system increase, by adding further resources. Normally those resources will be in the form of hardware. Since processor speeds are no longer increasing much, scaling up the hardware normally means adding extra processors or cores, and more memory.

Scalability and Software

However, scalability requires software that can utilize the extra hardware effectively. The software must be designed to allow parallel processing. In the context of a database engine this means that the server component must be multi-threaded, to allow the operating system to schedule parallel tasks on all the cores that are available. Not only that, but the database engine must provide an efficient way to break its workload into as many parallel tasks as there are cores. So, for example, if the database server always uses only four threads then it will make very little difference whether this server runs on a four-core machine or an eight-core machine.

Distributed Design