Read:
Dewitt, David, and Jim Gray. "Parallel Database Systems: The Future of High Performance Database Processing." Communications of the ACM 35, no. 6 (1992): 85-98. In the Red Book.
The Dewitt and Gray paper is a high level summary of database architectures for parallelism, illustrating some of the techniques that can be used to exploit the availability of multiple processors in a database system.
Questions to consider:
- What's the difference between a parallel and a distributed database? What issues are different in one architecture versus the other? In what ways are the two architectures alike?
- Why do Dewitt and Gray advocate a shared nothing architecture?
- In what ways must existing database architectures be modified to support multi-processor environments? What new data layout issues are introduced? What new query processing challenges must be addressed?