Navigation Server: a highly parallel DBMS on open systems

Navigation Server was jointly developed to provide a highly scalable, high-performance parallel database server in the industry. By combining ATandT´s experience in massively parallel systems, such as Teradata system, with Sybase´s industry-leading open, client/server DBMS, Navigation Server was developed with some specific design objectives: Scalability. Minimizing interference by minimizing resource sharing among the concurrent processes, the shared-nothing architecture has, as of today, emerged as the architecture of choice for highly scalable parallel systems. Navigation Server adopts the shared-nothing parallel architecture to allow parallelized queries, updates, load, backup, and other utilities on a partitioned database. Portability Built on top of Sybase´s open system products, Navigation Server is portable to Unix-based parallel machines. Further the shared-nothing software architecture demands minimal changes when porting Navigation Server to various parallel platforms ranging from symmetric multi-processing, clustered, to massively parallel processing systems. Availability. For a parallel system with many nodes, it may be often to see some hardware component failure. To achieve high availability, Navigation Server implements a hierarchical monitoring scheme to monitor all the running processes. With the monitoring frequency configurable by users, a process will be restarted automatically on an alternate node once a failure is detected. Usability. Navigation Server appears as a single Sybase SQL server to end users. Besides, it provides Sybase SQL Server two management tools: Configurator and Navigation Server Manager. The Configurator analyzes customers´ workload, monitors system performance, and recommends configurations for optimal performance and resource utilization. The Navigation Server Manager provides graphical utilities to administer the system simply and efficiently