The Multibackend Database System (MDBS): a Performance Study

The authors describe a performance evaluation study of an experimental database computer with a variable number of parallel database backends. They first discuss the performance measures employed for this type of database computer. Next, they describe the benchmarks and interpret the results. Preliminary test results indicate the viability and promise of this type of parallel database computer in performance gain and capacity growth. During the overhead-intensive portion of the performance evaluation, MDBS demonstrated good levels of response-time reduction and response-time invariance