Notes of 19 June 1997 meeting with Objectivity

(prepared by D. Olson)

Attendees:
Leon Guzenda (Director, Special Projects), Julie Tsoi (Sales Account Manager)
Arie Shoshani, Bill Johnston, Dave Malon, Dave Quarrie, Doron Rotem, Craig Tull, Doug Olson

Questions posed to Leon Guzenda in advance of meeting:

Hi Leon,

I think the interesting points to discuss about Objectivity are:

1. clustering objects in files/containers.

2. re-structuring - copying/moving objects from one file/container to another

3. DPSS as a scaleable high-performance block data server - Does Objectivity
  have anything equivalent (the page server?), can one think about using
  DPSS with Objectivity?
   If interested, you might look at http://www-itg.lbl.gov/DPSS/

4. Objectivity performance on a WAN: What is recommended structure?
   What would be interesting tests?

5. What is the security & authorization model for a federated DB on a WAN?

6. Objectivity on Intel/Solaris (or Linux).

Also:

	Doug, 
	
	If there's time, I would like to hear Guzenda address:
	
	  - what he thinks the primary obstacles to scalability to petabytes are
	  - his view of the ODMG model and bindings, and interactions with OMG
	  - can we be both ODMG-compliant AND scalable to petabytes? 
	
	David Malon

See you next week,
Doug

It was an interesting discussion, lasting 4 hours. Questions 1, 2, 3 and ODMG were covered and we did not get to 4, 5, 6.

On ODMG compliance the primary comments were that ODMG is an incomplete and slowly evolving standard and that the members consider 1 TB a huge database and scalability is not a primary concern. Scalability is an important concern to Objectivity but federations and HPSS are not likely to be standardized anytime soon.

Q 1. Objects are clustered in "containers" by specifying the desired container during the "new" operation. One ought to do this via a static member function which determines the clustering policy.

Q 2. Objectivity provides some tools for copying objects from one container to another and adjusting the uni- and bi-directional links as necessary.

Q 3. Leon appeared quite interested in DPSS in place of the Objectivity AMS. It would effectively permit an AMS to be scalable to larger capacities and higher bandwidths. A client could connect to a single DPSS system rather than many AMS servers in order to achieve the same data capacity and aggregate throughput.

There was quite a bit of discussion about the Objectivity-HPSS interface. The summary of this is that the initial Objectivity-HPSS connection will simply move DB files from tape to disk for Objectivity and any other HPSS interactions about placement, storage policies, etc. would be handled outside of Objectivity.

Last modified: 22 June, 1997