Future Work

The following page will summarize some of the future work discussion for WDB.

Vertical scaling: essentially adding more hardware ressources to the same machine (i.e., more and faster processors, memory and disk).

• Expensive
• Simple
• Single point of failure

We must ensure that WDB scales vertically with the hardware; i.e., increasing capacity by upgrading hardware specifications, while maintaining the physical footprint and number of servers in the server farm. Scaling hardware vertically simplifies site management, but at a higher hardware cost than scaling horizontally or improving software architecture. In addition, once you reach maximum capacity on existing hardware, you must begin to scale horizontally.

A key limitation in this respect is Postgres; version 8.3 however is vastly improved in terms of scalability compared to earlier versions of the database.

Horizontal scaling: Adding more machines into the mix - usually cheaper, smaller system.

• Cheap(er)
• Hard to implement
• Multiple points of failure

We would like to construct a framework for WDB that scales horizontally on the hardware; i.e., it should be possible to add new servers to our existing infrastructure and have it seamlessly improve performance of reads and (maybe) writes.

Optimizing WCI

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