What is database virtualization? You can be forgiven for thinking that it’s yet another buzz-word mining exercise invented for nefarious marketing purposes. It is in fact a real and useful idea and it’s only partly new. Oracle introduced its RAC (Real Application Cluster) architecture in 2001 with Oracle 9i, and this qualifies as database virtualization. I remember being impressed. It was innovative, relevant and an effective competitive move.

You may not remember, but at the time IBM was giving Oracle a good run for its money with DB2 and Oracle RAC gave Oracle the edge it needed to stay ahead. IBM never did build its own RAC capability, but it’s now partnering xkoto to offer a capability that I regard as better and it can genuinely be referred to as database virtualization.

So what is database virtualization?

I’ll try to explain this simply. In deploying databases we have tended to stay with the traditional tried and trusted method of configuring a large cluster with lots of memory and adequate amounts of disk, and inserting the database. We can still do that, of course, but hardware has been getting faster in every possible way and in every possible place. From a technical perspective, clusters are no longer really necessary. It is possible to use the speed of the network to build informal clusters on the fly, if you really want to. (see The Server Vendors v Cisco: Is This A New Technology War? for more information). And that reality is part of what makes xkoto’s GRIDSCALE a technology to be reckoned with.

From a software perspective, it is possible to split a large database into a number of different instances and parse the SQL calls in flight, turning them into multiple calls to the multiple instances. You then manage the responses. It’s not a trivial trick to pull off, but it can be done and if you do that, what you have is a virtual database made up of multiple physical instances. And you can happily dual up some or all of the instances, so that if one fails, the whole virtual database can continue without pausing for breath. GRIDSCALE can do that.

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The above illustration shows an example of a GRIDSCALE configuration, with the remote Atlanta site firing query traffic at a replicated instance of a database. It’s an example of how GIRDSCALE users actually use the product.

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