On the application of parallel database technology for large scale document management systems

Modern document management systems administer an increasing amount of data. Unfortunately traditional database technology cannot satisfy the resulting performance requirements. We report on how parallel database technology can contribute to make large and scalable document management systems work. Our discussion clearly shows that simply substituting a sequential database system for a parallel one does not necessarily lead to scalability and high performance. In contrast, detailed knowledge of the application and document management system is necessary to decide on the optimal architecture of the parallel database system, its query optimization and parallelization strategies, as well as on its data fragmentation scheme and load balancing properties. All discussions are exemplified referring to an existing document management system developed at our university that is currently migrated from a sequential database system to a parallel one.