Future Work

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

Scaling Hardware Vertically

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.

Scaling Hardware Horizontally

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 WDB

Optimizing WCI

Optimizing WDB2TS

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