Performance Comparison of Three Modern DBMS Architectures

The introduction of powerful workstations connected through local area networks (LAN’s) inspired new DBMS architectures that offer high performance characteristics. In this paper, we examine three such software architecture configurations: Client-Server (CS), RAD-UNIFY® type of DBMS (RU), and Enhanced Client-Server (ECS). Their specific functional components and design rationales are discussed. We use three simulation models to provide a performance comparison under different job workloads. Our simulation results show that the RU almost always performs slightly better than the CS, especially under light workloads, and that ECS offers significant performance improvement over both CS and RU. Under reasonable update rates, the ECS over CS (or RU) performance ratio is almost proportional to the number of participating clients (for less than 32 clients). We also examine the impact of certain key parameters on the performance of the three architectures and finally show that ECS is more scalable that the other two.