Dynamic allocation in a self-scaling cluster database

Database systems have been vital for all forms of data processing for a long time. In recent years, the amount of processed data has been growing dramatically, even in small projects. Nevertheless, database management systems tend to be static in terms of size and performance, which makes scaling a difficult and an expensive task. This is especially an acute problem in dynamic environments such as grid systems. On the basis of the C-JDBC project, we developed a cluster database that supports automatic scaling in the number of nodes used. To ensure good load balancing, we distribute the tablespace according to a statistical analysis of the query history. In this paper, we will focus on the allocation algorithm. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.