Amit Khandekar: A Shared nothing Cluster System Postgres XC

Postgres-XC is a PostgreSQL clustering solution built to achieve write-scalability using a shared-nothing architecture. It is an open source project being developed by Postgres-XC development group. The talk describes where Postgres-XC stands today with respect to the essentials of a shared-nothing distributed architecture, and what is yet to achieve. To configure or develop a parallel distributed database system a lot of factors come into picture, like performance scalability, load balancing, high availability, I/O bottleneck, query parallelism, data placement and redistribution, complexity of node management, etc. Furthermore, a shared-nothing cluster architecture has its own advantages and disadvantages as against shared-disk or shared-memory architecture. This talk aims to provide a high level view of where Postgres-XC stands with respect to all the above requirements of a shared-nothing distributed cluster system, keeping in mind the Postgres-XC user/administrator. It will explain the core functionalities that Postgres-XC has implemented for achieving the above goals by briefly describing each of the above requirements along with use-cases, and then move on to describing what all is yet to achieve, and the scope for further developing the project and working towards achieving a more usable, scalable, robust open-source cluster solution.